Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (4 page)

“Impossible,” Shan said. “You know it is impossible.” Putting an expedition on the slopes meant weeks of planning, permits, surveying advance campsites, staging supplies.

The stranger pushed a small stack of napkins toward Shan, motioning to a wet spot of crimson on the table. Blood was dripping from the bandage on Shan’s temple.

“Damn it Shan,” Tsipon snapped, switching to Tibetan, “this American is fat with cash. His company has three expeditions already paid for. Do you have any idea how much money that means? He is going to charge them another twenty percent for coming to China, which I’m to get a quarter of.”

As Shan pressed a napkin to his head the woman reappeared, setting a plate of steaming
momo
, Tibetan dumplings, in front of him. His free hand seemed to act of its own accord, darting out, stuffing one into his mouth.

“I need sherpas,” Tsipon said, “mountain porters, mules, and horses. New camps have to be laid out, supplies staged, new safety lines rigged.”

Shan glanced back and forth from one man to the other. “Just go up to the villages,” he said as he gulped down another momo. “Enough cash can work miracles.” He was suddenly ravenous, and recalled he had eaten only a few mouthfuls of cold rice during the past three days.

“Not this time,” Tsipon explained. “There is a complication. The sherpas blame me. I blame you.”

Shan glanced at the American, who sipped at his tea with a confused, self-conscious expression, obviously not understanding their Tibetan words but not missing the tension between the two. “For what?”

“That sherpa you were carrying. Tenzin. He was well liked, came from a big family living on both sides of the border, famous for having reached the summit as a teenager years ago. They want his body.”

The momo in Shan’s hand stopped in midair. “Surely someone found the mule. It wouldn’t wander far.”

“No. Nothing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Let me spell it out,” Tsipon said, still in Tibetan. “This fool American and his partner are offering the best opportunity I’ve ever had, the best this town has ever had. You agreed to work for me because I could get you into the yeti factory to see that worthless son of yours.”

Shan’s head snapped up, strangely fearful over the mention of his son, even more alarmed that someone might overhear and guess the secret that had brought him to the region. A wild hope had nurtured him through the dreadful hours in the jail and many dark nights before, a dream, a fantasy, that somehow he would not only reach his son in the knobs’ secret hospital, but discover some means to get him out, at least back to the gulag camps in Lhadrung where Shan and his friends could help him.

“I agreed to hire you because of your magic at fixing problems with those old-fashioned ones, up in the mountains.”

Shan stared at his momo, shaking his head from side to side. “You were supposed to get me in. I’ve waited two months.”

“That was Thursday, when you were going to join me on an official Party delegation to inspect the place. You missed your date.”

The desolation that gripped Shan was so overpowering he had to brace himself with a hand on the table. “Then when’s the next one?” he asked in a hollow voice.

“Find me that dead sherpa,” Tsipon said in a matter-of-fact voice, “or forget about seeing your son.”

Shan stared at Tsipon in disbelief. He hadn’t been released from captivity. Tsipon and the knobs had just found a new form of torture.

He gradually became aware that more napkins were being pushed toward him by Yates. Blood was dripping onto his dumplings. He pushed away his plate, nauseated, and with great effort rose. He swayed, took a single faltering step, and collapsed to the ground unconscious.

HE WAS NOT aware of being moved, only of the pain coursing through his body then, later, of dim lights in the blackness, and more nightmares. The pain rose in tides, ebbing and surging, making it impossible to focus, to try to make sense of the events that had occurred since he’d left Tenzin’s body on the mountain. Faces from his past in Beijing mocked him. Visions of Ko being tortured intensified, mingled with questioning, lifeless faces: of the blond woman on the mountain asking why she had to die, of Tenzin asking why Shan had abandoned him in the hour he needed him the most. When Shan woke, in the blackness, a single thought sustained him. Tsipon did not understand. Shan had another way to reach his son. He simply had to reach the new hotel at the base of the mountain, and he could leave Tsipon and Cao and the murders behind. Before he passed out again he heard himself call out for Ko, pleading with him to survive, to endure the tortures of the clinic.

At last there was only the goddess. Floating in the darkness, she gazed at him with strained tolerance, reproach in her eyes, reminding him there were fugitive monks in the mountains, frightened monks who needed his help.

Each time he woke he became more aware of his surroundings. Tea and noodles appeared beside his pallet, and when he consumed them they were magically replenished, waiting for him beside a flickering candle each time he regained consciousness. Then, finally, suddenly, he was awake, able to sit up.

He discovered that his dark chamber had been made by hanging heavy black felt blankets around his pallet, supported by climbing ropes. At each side of his makeshift closet sat an upturned wooden crate. On another upturned crate to his left was a stack of gauze topped by a roll of medical tape and an envelope of antibiotic powder. To his right was a small figurine of the Tibetan protec-tress deity Tara. Flanking the Tara were two brown smoldering sticks stuck in a plank, a familiar mantra scrawled on a scrap of paper between them. He recognized the odor of aloe. Someone had been tending him with bandages and pills. Someone else had been treating him with healing incense and an invocation of the Medicine Buddha.

Shan slowly rose, stretching, rubbing the stiffness out of his limbs. Then he probed the blankets until he found an opening, and staggered out into a familiar maze of stone and old beams. The stable that he had adopted two months before as his living quarters, abandoned decades earlier, was at the mouth of the wide gully that served as the dump for Shogo town. Though it was shunned by the townspeople, though Tsipon had offered him quarters in the rear of his warehouse, Shan had been drawn to the place. It was old and decaying, but as he aged he found himself more and more comfortable with the old and decaying, particularly the old and decaying of Tibet. He had seen the heavy hand-hewn posts and beams rising out of the rubble, as solid as they had been when erected centuries earlier. He had also seen under the rear piles of rubble something else that had been the real reason he had set up his meager household there. He hobbled to the makeshift workbench, threw off the dusty canvas that covered it, and confirmed that nothing had been touched. Spread over the planks were a score of ancient carved printing blocks, used for printing
peche
, the traditional Tibetan books of prayer. His spare hours at the stable were spent restoring the long rectangular blocks retrieved from the rubble, fitting and gluing together pieces that had been split apart, scraping away the dirt and dried manure that filled the carved characters and ritual images. He lifted the block he had last worked on and without conscious effort began scraping away its grime.

It had become a nightly ritual, the thing that brought him so close to his old friends Gendun and Lokesh that he sometimes sensed them at his side, a better restorative than any salve or pill.

Shan finished the rosewood peche plate, a page of the heart sutra with images of birds carved along the borders, and put it in a sack he kept in the shadows; he would take the best of the peche boards back to Lhadrung, so they would be safe with his friends in their secret hermitage. He had begun another block, clearing it with a brush he had made with hairs from the old mule’s mane, when a thought began to nag him, growing until he set the brush down and stared into the shadows. Not once had anyone mentioned the dead Westerner. The murder of a state minister might be big news in Beijing but the murder of a Westerner in the shadow of Everest would draw global headlines.

The open, pleading face of the blond woman who had died in his arms kept leaping into his consciousness, the foreigner who, impossibly, had been traveling alone with the minister.
Is it me?

she had asked, as if she had been uncertain who was dying.

“They say there is still a gompa in the mountains that uses these things,” an uneasy voice suddenly declared behind him.

Shan spun about to see a tall Tibetan in sunglasses silhouetted in the doorway, looking at the peche plates.

“With a printing press I mean, the last in the region.”

Shan felt a rush of joy at the unexpected news. “Do you know where?” He had a sudden vision of himself carrying a bundle of the plates to the gompa, could almost see the joy of the old lamas when they saw what he had brought them.

Kypo shrugged. “In the mountains. We have to go. Tsipon said the moment you could stand I was to bring you.” Tsipon’s lead manager for expedition support was always a man of few words.

Shan rose from his stool. “Thank you, Kypo, for my—” he gestured to the stall that had been concealed with blankets—“my hospital room.”

“Tsipon said to put you in one of the storerooms in the warehouse, or that cottage behind the warehouse. I said you would want to be here, with your—” Kypo glanced at the workbench— “things.”

Shan had not hidden his work on the blocks from Kypo, but the Tibetan never once had asked about them, or seemed remotely interested. “He said make sure you were somewhere dark and warm.”

“You brought the food and things?”

“I brought the food and bandages,” Kypo replied pointedly, and stepped into the sunlight.

Minutes later Shan walked through the open garage door at the side of the largest building in town, emblazoned with a sign for the Himalayan Supply Company. Workers were carrying boxes, loading trucks bound for the Chomolungma base camp. Tsipon, standing with a clipboard in the entry to a storeroom lined with shelves, gestured Shan through the door. Shan found himself glancing around the room, where he had conducted inventory a week earlier. The shelves then had been overflowing with cartons containing oxygen cylinders, flashlight batteries, pitons, harnesses, heavy ropes coiled over long pegs. Now half the supplies were gone.

Tsipon tossed Shan an apple. “If you cost me this contract, Shan, you and I are done,” he growled. “And if I say goodbye, it’s not just goodbye to your son, it’s goodbye to the Himalayas.” Everything in Tsipon’s life was a negotiation. He had to be sure Shan knew that without his protection Shan would be picked up and detained for having no residency papers.

“You should have wakened me,” Shan said. “I should have been in the mountains already.”

Tsipon shook his head. “There were troops all over the mountains searching for those damned escaped monks. If some officer in the mountain commandos found you, without registration papers, how long do you think you’d last? And the shape you were in, you probably would have crawled off to some cave and died just to spite me.”

Shan took a bite of the apple. “Who else came to the stable?” he asked. He knew Tsipon, one of the most worldly Tibetans he had ever known, was not capable of making the little altar or writing the mantra.

Tsipon ignored the question. He stepped to the shelves, reached into a carton and tossed out clothing, kicking it toward Shan. “I’ve promised the American a dozen experienced porters next week. I went to Tumkot village yesterday,” he said, referring to the mountain village that supplied most of the porters and guides used by the foreign climbing parties. “I offered double wages. They practically threw me out. Their damned fortuneteller has them all worked up, telling them the signs say the mountain must be appeased, that the mountain had claimed Tenzin first and needed him back. They demand the body. I promised them you would get it for them.”

“When?”

Tsipon stuck his head out the door long enough to chide a Tibetan woman who had dropped a box of fuel canisters. “We have maybe three days, no more,” he snapped, and gestured Shan out the door into the cavernous main chamber of the warehouse. After locking the storeroom behind him, Tsipon lowered himself onto a crate and lit a cigarette.

“Have the foreigners arrived yet?”

“You met that Yates.”

“I mean officials. From some embassy, over the other dead woman.”

Tsipon cast a puzzled glance at him, blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “They must have hit your head pretty hard. There was no dead foreigner.”

The announcement silenced Shan for a moment. He closed his eyes, again fighting his confused swirl of memories from the day of the murders. “What was the bargain you struck with Major Cao?” he asked at last.

The Tibetan blew two streams of smoke from his nostrils. “Bargain?”

“What was your accommodation with Public Security?” Shan pressed. “If I wasn’t his prime suspect, I was the closest thing he had to a witness. He would have at least held me for having no papers.”

“For this kind of case he needs to paint a very complete picture. He seems to want nothing more to do with you, though he knows you were on the fringe of the scene he is painting. I am to watch you and report back to him,” Tsipon admitted. “He might try to have you followed, though once in the mountains that should not be a problem for one of your capabilities.”