Mandarin Gate (22 page)

He was asleep on the cot when the surprised shout of a guard awakened him. Early morning light filtered through the window. The Tibetan still sat on the floor, though he was singing a quiet song now. The guard ran out of the building and returned moments later with two more guards. All three men began shouting angrily, pointing at Shan, then the Tibetan, then the little creatures placed around their cells and the circle on the Tibetan’s floor. Using Shan’s chalk and his careful instructions, the Tibetan had created a mandala around the round drain plate in the floor. Using the entire pad of paper meant for his confession Shan had created origami birds. Small flocks roosted on the windowsills of the two cells, others were scattered around the cells. One guard ran back to the doorway, to warn his comrades of any approaching officer as the others opened the cell doors, cursing the two grinning prisoners as they quickly gathered up the birds and scuffed away the prayer circle with their boots.

With angry taps of their batons they pushed Shan against a wall, then fastened manacles to his feet before dragging him to the interrogation table. They disappeared and returned with a tepid cup of tea, which he slowly sipped. He made a show of stretching, ignoring his watchers to better survey the area around the table. His gaze lingered on the chair where Meng had sat for so long, watching him, then he scanned the walls and ceiling.

The small black instrument blended into the shadows of the corner where walls and ceiling met. A camera. Meng had sat in the only chair that was invisible to the camera that monitored the room, had kept her back to it and her head bent so she would not have been identified when she had stepped to his cell.

He drained the cup, then clutched his stomach and convulsed, spitting up the brown liquid, looking about desperately before leaping toward the trash basket to spit up more. One of the guards laughed, the other barked a curse and stepped away from Shan. As he leaned into the basket he grabbed the wad of paper at the bottom and stuffed it down his shirt.

A moment later the door opened and Liang marched in. The guards darted to Shan and heaved him back into the chair. As Liang silently stepped behind him, his neck exploded in pain. Shan’s body was wracked in a convulsion that slammed his back into the metal chair, leaving him gasping.

“Excellent,” Liang declared as he paused at the opposite side of the table. “I have your attention.” In his hand was a small electronic taser device. The knobs had once preferred electronic cattle prods. They were keeping up with technical advances.

A guard dropped one of Shan’s little paper cranes in front of Liang. The major sighed. He picked up the crane, then carefully tore its wings and head off. A cool grin grew on his face as he tossed the remains of the bird at Shan, then made a show of increasing the intensity of the taser.

“You got yourself thrown into that reeducation camp to see someone,” Liang stated. “I think it was some of those nuns who knew the dead abbess. What do they know of the murders? Tell me now and we can be more gentle with them.”

Shan spoke first in Tibetan, watching the anger build in Liang’s face, then translated into Chinese. “Nuns are the messengers of the gods. Be careful what you ask them.”

Liang lifted the taser and paced along the table again. “In India I hear there used to be huge, unnaturally strong men who were kept by the rajas to conduct torture. They could twist a man’s head off. I read once how they would drive a spike into a man’s skull with their bare fists.” He lifted the little electronic box in his hand. “When I trained for this device,” he explained with a mock fascination in this voice, “they said it sent a spike of lightning into the flesh, said to be sure to only use it on muscle tissue.” Shan gripped the arms of the chair as Liang moved back around the table. “But I’ve always wondered if the skull could block lightning.”

The pain was like none Shan had ever known. His back arced, his eyes saw nothing but explosions of light. His body moved involuntarily, convulsing, slamming against the chair, then slamming his head against the table, pounding the table again and again. Tea and stomach acid dribbled down his chin. Liang laughed and pressed the instrument into his scalp again. The spike was in Shan’s brain, driving deeper and deeper.

Shan was surely dying. Surely no one could feel such pain and live. His hands on the arms of the chair jerked up and down. His skull was going to explode. The white-hot fire in his head ebbed and flared, ebbed and flared, as if someone kept blowing on its coals. His head slumped onto his chest. He was aware of nothing but the roar of his pain.

He jerked upright, moaning, as cold water was poured over him.

“We will talk about those nuns,” Liang growled.

Shan’s eyes had difficulty focusing. He made out Liang’s hand, adjusting the taser again. He thought of his son, and of Lokesh. This was the end. He was always going to die at the hands of some knob, he had just not known when.

“Anyone who aids that American bitch is a traitor to the motherland!” Liang snarled. “Anyone who—” His words choked away as the door was wrenched open.

A tall thin man with a hatchet face appeared, wearing the field uniform of a senior army officer, flanked by two rock-hard men in the fatigues of mountain commandos. The tall man grabbed the taser and threw it against the wall so hard it shattered.

As a guard moved to protect Liang, the officer gestured and one of his escorts flattened the man with a short, swift chop.

“My name is Colonel Tan,” the officer announced. “I am governor of Lhadrung County.” His voice was the low growl of a predator ready to spring.

Liang’s mouth moved but no one words came out.

Tan pointed to Shan. “That man is mine!”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Tan ordered their car to stop when they crested the ridge that meant they were back in Lhadrung County. He gestured Shan out, then ordered his men to stay with the vehicle as they walked to a ledge that overlooked the valley.

Tan said nothing until he had lit a cigarette. “You’re a fucking mess. What did he do to you?”

Shan couldn’t stop the tremors in his hand. He stared at it a moment, then gripped it tightly with his other hand. “An experiment. He called it driving lightning into my skull.”

The colonel exhaled two sharp columns of smoke from his nostrils. “It has to do with the murders up here.”

“I don’t think they’ve been officially recognized as such.”

Tan ignored him. “With your unofficial meddling in these unofficial murders. Damn you, you can never leave things alone. It’s a Public Security matter. You know I have no authority.”

Shan recognized the ice in the colonel’s voice, knew the heat of his temper could burn hotter than any taser. He took an unsteady step and lowered himself onto a boulder. “A dead German. A missing American. If you are lucky you have maybe two or three weeks before foreigners are all over your county. First the embassies. Then the reporters.”

Tan inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “How many years does he have left?”

Shan’s heart sagged. Tan knew ways to torture him that Liang could never dream of. “Ten years. Ko has ten years left.”

“With one short message I could have him shipped to another prison. Manchuria. The Gobi. The jungle. If you started right away, you probably wouldn’t even locate him in ten years. But then you have no papers so you’d probably be picked up too.”

“I have the work papers you gave me.”

“Exactly. They would call my office. Everytime I hear your name I will have your son transferred again. When he’s released he will have no idea where you are. The two of you will grow old trying to find each other, wandering around China. Like one of those old tragic operas.”

Shan struggled to control his pain, and his despair. Liang would invent threats, just to intimidate those he questioned. Tan never made idle threats. He would do it. He would consider it his duty to do so. “The murders happened in Lhadrung County,” Shan said. “When the foreigners arrive, they will start with you.”

“We will not permit them to come.”

“You know those foreign reporters. They will just get in a car and start driving. Refuse them and they just get more persistent. You can’t imprison them. Turn one away and two come back. Someone will ask why the locals call the districts in the northern county Tan’s Hellhole. How many prisons do you have now? Ten? A dozen? They will discover your penal colony. Better hope some American politician is caught with a mistress that day, or you’ll be on every front page in the West.”

“Public Security knows how to deal with such things.”

“You of all people expect Public Security to find the truth?”

Tan frowned. “I said they would deal with it.”

“Liang is one of those who searches for the most convenient solution. You are familiar with the type if I am not mistaken.” The year before Shan had saved Tan from another overzealous knob who had jailed him for murder. Tan owed Shan his life, and hated Shan for it.

Tan gazed at him in silence, took a long draw on his cigarette, and flung the butt over the ledge. “I will leave you at the clinic in Baiyun. If you trouble me again I won’t even give you a chance to say good-bye to your son.”

*   *   *

The nurse who managed the clinic shook her head as she studied Shan’s hand. Every time she straightened his fingers they curled back, digging into his palm.

“There’s nerve damage,” she declared. “You should go to Lhasa for a scan. Who knows what damage there is to your brain.” She had cleaned the oozing burn on his scalp where Liang had pressed the taser.

“I thought perhaps a couple of aspirin,” Shan said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Like a blade is in my skull, twisting back and forth.”

The Chinese woman frowned. “You must rest. Take a week off. You could kill yourself if you push hard.”

He heard the door open behind him. The assistant in the office had been furious when Tan’s guards had shoved Shan in ahead of the half-dozen patients waiting there.

The nurse frowned and handed him an unlabeled bottle of red pills. “Go home. Let your family nurse you.”

“An excellent suggestion,” came a voice behind him.

Shan turned to see Professor Yuan at his shoulder. “Shall we go, Xiao Shan?” the professor asked with a sweep of his hand toward the door. Xiao Shan. It was how an uncle might address the younger members of his family.

“I can’t…” Shan murmured.

“You can,” Yuan insisted, and pulled him up from the exam table. “You will. We have a dilemma we need you to resolve.”

Shan followed in a fog of pain and fatigue. A quarter hour later he collapsed on a bed in the professor’s house, having swallowed a bowl of broth and two of the red pills.

When he awoke it was dark. A candle burned by his bed. He looked out at the moon. He had slept for at least ten hours. The scalding pain in his head was gone, replaced with a dull ache. He extended his fingers. On one hand they stayed straight, on the other they instantly curled back up. He tried to stand, and fell back on the bed. For a long time he stared at the floor as memories of his imprisonment returned, then he reached inside his shirt and straightened the wad of paper he had retrieved from the wastebasket. It was a blank prisoner assignment form. Meng had not thrown out his letter. She had performed a charade for the surveillance camera to save his letter to Ko.

From the sitting room he heard gentle laughter and the sound of several voices speaking in Chinese. With a strange awkwardness he approached the door, then hesitated, looking about the room as if for the first time. There was a dresser with framed photos of a much younger Yuan with his wife and daughter Sansan, several of Sansan alone. There were three sheets of graceful calligraphy pinned to the wall, lines from ancient poems, beside pegs hung with clothing.

He steadied himself on the back of a chair, fighting a new wave of emotion. This was how the home of a family looked. Never in Shan’s life had he had such a place, such a home, and he knew that he probably never would. He forced himself to look away, then opened the door, stepped out, and froze.

Four men and a woman, all in their late sixties or seventies, sat around the table. A pall of tobacco smoke hung over the candlelit room. A bottle of cheap rice wine and glasses were on the table, in the center of which were several dice and a bundle of sticks. It was a scene of his youth, when the older inhabitants of his block stayed up into the small hours of the morning, tossing numbers to consult the
I Ching.
It was a timeless scene, a fixture of Chinese villages for centuries.

Professor Yuan looked up from the table. “Xiao Shan! Please come sit with us! We are eager for your advice.”

As the professor introduced Shan to his companions Shan realized he had seen most of them before, playing chess or checkers in the town square.

“The hero of the hammer,” proclaimed the oldest of the men, a nearly bald man with thick horn-rimmed glasses. “You know, they wrapped a white canvas around the statue afterwards. In the moonlight he is the ghost of Baiyun.” He lifted his glass of wine to Shan. “They will replace him eventually. But because of you we will always see it as just another ghost. A noseless ghost,” he said with a wheezing laugh. “We salute you for being brave enough to do what each of us has dreamed of doing ever since they put that damned statue up.”

Shan silently accepted a glass of wine and sat beside the professor. “You mentioned a dilemma?”

“Our little society strives to better understand the old ways. I know you are well versed in tradition.” Yuan gestured to a long scroll of paper opened and weighed down with books at each end. The elderly woman was painting with watercolors on the thick parchment. The images progressed from skyscrapers and city blocks shaded with trees to trains and mountains, then yaks and donkeys. With a flash of excitement he realized she was recording the story of the Harbin exiles in the scroll painting style that had been used to chronicle events during the imperial reigns. He had seen the scroll before, when Yuan had hidden it behind his back to keep the knobs from discovering it. “We have been debating a point of court ceremony,” Yuan explained.