Soul of the Fire (21 page)

“I thought…,” he began. “I was hoping I could get him to speak with the Americans.”

“Then thank the gods he's gone.” Lam took Shan's arm and tried to push him out of the room.

He wouldn't move. “Where?”

“He was taken away by an ambulance early this morning. They would only say they had orders to take him to another facility.”

“Had his condition worsened? Had you requested a transfer?”

“No, and no. His condition had much improved. He no longer needed constant sedation.”

“Meaning he would have been able to talk.”

Lam looked like she had bitten something sour. “They had the proper paperwork.” She pushed him again.

He took a step and stopped. “Did you test the blood on the pin?”

“I tested it. Alone in my lab.”

“It was Deng's?”

“It was somewhat distinctive. But with over a billion people in China, there's easily a thousand who would fit that profile.”

“Meaning the chances it was someone else are one in a million.”

She herded him out of the room and shut the door behind her. “Comrade, I feel I have a professional duty to warn you. Your overactive imagination is going to severely impair your health.”

*   *   *

Her blessed father died
. As Madam Choi droned on about the class background of still another immolation victim, Shan found he had written the words on his notepad. He crossed them out with a quick, nervous motion and looked up at Choi with the expression of a bored student. He found himself thinking of Lokesh but also increasingly of Tserung and Dolma. Lokesh's wife, who had moved to Lhadrung and faithfully visited him during his decades of imprisonment, died shortly after his release. If she had survived, the two of them would have been much like the old couple in Yamdrok, secretly keeping the spiritual traditions alive and even more secretly helping prisoners and dissidents. If discovered, Tserung and Dolma would have no trial. Pao would send a squad and they would disappear in the mountains.

He looked down at the crossed-out words.
Her blessed father died
. It seemed to refer to the death of a teacher, a lama. Shan studied the list of reviewed cases clipped to the left side of the folder opened before him. The dead included young monks, nuns, mechanics, herders, farmers, even schoolteachers, but he could not recall a lama who had sacrificed himself.

Shan looked up. Commissioner Vogel had taken the chair, but he wasn't talking about immolations.

“Thirty minutes will be allotted to us,” the German announced. “We have commitments from Mr. Judson and Kolsang. Anyone else?”

Shan saw the expectant way Judson looked at him, but did not understand. “The voice of another rehabilitated prisoner would be fitting,” the American suggested.

“Thirty minutes for what exactly?” Shan asked.

Vogel gave an impatient frown. “We are speaking of the funeral of Commissioner Xie. The government has graciously agreed to a private affair in an old gompa near where he once lived. No military. No police, only the Commission and its staff and old friends. A thoroughly Buddhist affair.”

No police, only Commission staff. It meant Sung would be there, with knobs in civilian clothes.

“I am sure I would have something to contribute,” Shan offered, looking only at Vogel. “And where is it exactly we are going?”

Vogel looked to Miss Zhu, who searched in a file and produced a map that she unfolded on the table. “Shetok
gompa,
” she stated, and pointed to the town twenty miles north of Zhongje, positioned like the gateway into Taktsang, the lair of the
purbas.

“The leaders of prominent local monasteries will be in attendance,” Vogel explained, casting an uncertain glance at Kolsang. “The day after tomorrow.”

Shan looked at Sung sitting by the door. He wore the expression of a predator who had his prey in sight. The major was baiting his trap with lamas.

He gazed down at the file in despair, then unfolded the latest copy of the death poems being secretly posted around the town. He had pulled the sheet from the bulletin board near his quarters that morning. So far, they were still only in Tibetan, and most of those using the residence units probably assumed they were work listings for the Tibetan staff. He had found himself repeating the poems, as if they were an evolving mantra. A new one had been added at the bottom.
The heat of my spirit erupts,
it said, then
Who will continue this poem?

When he looked up, only Kolsang remained in the room. “You have to stop, Shan. Now there's talk that you think Xie and Deng were both murdered. They won't allow it. They will destroy you like—”

“Like Xie?” Shan rose and motioned the Tibetan toward the chairs directly under the ventilation grille, in the surveillance camera's blind spot. “Before he died, you spoke up. Now Choi just thinks you are her rubber stamp.”

“I told you. Pao is a passing storm. Let it go.”

Shan saw now that Kolsang was struggling to remain calm. “What have they done to you?”

Kolsang cast a wary glance toward the door. “What they want more than anything is to capture the
purba
leader. It's why they moved the Commission to Zhongje, because it is closer to where they think the purbas operate. But we have nothing to do with that. We're puppets on a side stage.”

“It isn't simply that Xie was killed,” Shan suggested. “What did they do to you?”

Kolsang dropped his head into his hands. “I'm not supposed to speak of it. My wife. My two sons and daughter. The day Xie died, they arrested my family. If I cause a problem, I won't see them for years.”

*   *   *

The Commission offices felt more and more like a prison. Shan retreated outside, walking past the gate and along the wall, trying to clear his mind by thinking of his last visit to his son. Ko had looked exhausted, but Shan saw something new in his eyes, an inner strength that he knew was being nurtured by the lamas in the prison.

As he turned at the end of the wall to head back toward the open-air market, a uniformed figure rounded the corner on the path used by patrols. The constable corporal walked beside him for several steps before speaking. A baton hung on his belt, a black nylon pouch hung from his shoulder.

“I saw you that day after you left my station,” the corporal announced.

Shan's kept looking ahead, his jaw tightening. “Surely you could manage a more entertaining pastime, Corporal, than watching me.”

“I was at that accident. You bought a dumpling and fed it to the dog.”

Shan turned in surprise. “Guilty as charged.”

“The dog isn't safe in this town. The owner of that new restaurant is Cantonese. You know what they say about Cantonese.”

“They'll eat anything with four legs except the table.”

“The dog's been hiding. He knows he could end up in a stewpot.”

“So give him a home.”

The corporal shook his head. “Can't have a dog without a license from the Municipal Council. Can't get a license without paying a bribe. I don't make enough, not for a license or for Public Security games.”

Shan stopped. They weren't speaking about dogs anymore.

“You said you put knobs in jail.”

“A long time ago.”

The constable picked up a stone and hurled it at the town wall. “I used to be in a little farming town north of Lhasa. It was peaceful. They said this was a promotion. I hate these walls. They're claustrophobic.” He picked up another stone and stared at it. “Major Sung came to me. He misplaced his car.”

“You mean it was stolen?”

“Missing. It was in the parking lot at the Party building. He just wanted me to keep an eye out. Nothing official. He stressed that. No report, no formal alert.”

“Maybe he just forgot where he actually left it. It happens.”

“To Major Sung? I doubt it.”

Shan was not sure how to read the constable's face. There was caution on it, but also challenge. “How long have you been in Tibet, Corporal?”

“Eighteen years. My wife hated it. Got a divorce the second year and went back to Harbin.”

“But you stayed all this time.”

The constable tossed the stone and began walking again. “Sometimes two flocks of sheep come down the same road in opposite directions. Someone has to manage such catastrophes.” His eyes—but only his eyes—smiled.

They were approaching the market. One of the vendors, a young woman wearing a derby, rose. Shan expected her to back away but instead she offered a shy smile to the constable, who reached into the pouch that hung from his shoulder and extracted a sheaf of papers bound with a rubber band. “The knobs tell me to pull all these down,” he said to Shan, “but they never tell me what to do with them.” He offered a Tibetan greeting to the woman and handed her the papers, which she slid inside her vest. It was a stack of death poems. “They can always use them in the village, I figure,” he said to Shan. “You know. Fire-starters.”

*   *   *

The wind fangs nipped at his heels as he approached Yamdrok. It was dusk, and the town was winding down for the day. As he passed the gully that led up the mountain, Shan pulled his hat low, holding it against the angry gusts from the top of the peak, then slipped into the shadows as he reached the buildings.

The donkey cart was outside the clinic again, a fresh puddle beneath. Shan extracted the old bronze key Tserung had given him and moments later was inside. Dolma sat cross-legged on the floor before the dead man, her vigil lit only by butter lamps. Cones of sweet incense had been balanced along the edge of the coffin. Shan lowered himself to the floor beside the woman.

She did not speak for several minutes. “We were shamed when he married my younger sister,” the former nun finally declared. “He was a half blood, spawn of some Chinese soldier who had raped a herder's daughter. My sister was many years younger than me, beautiful inside and out, the joy of my father's life, and it broke his heart. My parents and the others in that village near Shetok were cruel to Xie, but he didn't mind. He truly loved my sister and was willing to pay the price to be with her. At first I thought he would be one of those mixed bloods who just roam about Tibet without any purpose.

“But he was different. He was clever at playing the games of the government, so he always had a job, was always able to get us food even during the years of famine. My parents wouldn't speak with him, but he would leave little packages of food on their front step. My mother grew to accept him, but my father never changed, would not let my mother set a place for him at our table or keep a cushion for him at our altar. But Xie never showed resentment. He had gone to Chinese schools but always wanted to learn Tibetan ways. My father said he was a spy. My mother said he was just another pilgrim trying to find his path.”

“He was sent to prison,” Shan said.

Dolma sighed. “Accused of stealing a shipment of food for the black market. He served only two years in one of those farm prisons. He was released early after he organized work units among the inmates to increase production. He was declared rehabilitated. Later an old herder told me Xie had stolen that food and driven it up into the mountains to keep the herding families alive for the winter after their herds died in a storm.”

Dolma stood and replenished a butter lamp that was sputtering out. “After he advanced to a job in Religious Affairs, I would see him at my convent. He would come with those indoctrination teams to read political tracts to us, but whenever he was alone with us, he would ask us to read to him from the old sutras. He warned us to take great care of the old books, that others might want to destroy them, and suggested we take them into the caves of Taktsang.”

“Where the shrine was you visited years ago. The knobs asked Lokesh about it.”

“It is a secret, protected place, like a sacred garden, a refuge for the spirits. For years every spring, until their baby was born, they would do a pilgrimage around all its old shrines. I didn't see him again for years. Xie was busy with his job, and raising his child after my sister died.

“A few months before I was arrested, a novice came to me in the night, very excited, saying to come quickly. It was past midnight, and Xie sat in a
dunkang,
one of the old dark crypt chapels. He was at the front like a lama, translating foreign writings for a group of nuns. The American Declaration of Independence. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man. It became a ritual, sort of our midnight prayers, whenever he visited. The next morning, he would be conducting his usual classes about Chinese doctrine, but it was those nights we remembered. It kept the spark of hope alive in me while I was in prison.”

She fell silent and sipped from a bottle of water at her side. “He was a very quiet man, but full of big ideas that he knew could be spoken of only in secret. He was terribly troubled by working for Religious Affairs, but he had decided it was the way he could do the most good. He would volunteer to handle shipments of artifacts seized from Tibetans, the ones that go to be melted in Chinese foundries, and then he would falsify papers and arrange for Tibetans to pick them up and secret them in the mountains. Once he was able to visit me in prison. He told me that our job was to plant the
terma
for those who come after the end of time, like Milarepa and others did centuries ago.” The former nun turned to Shan. “Do you know about
terma,
my friend?”

Shan smiled at the question, and at the way Dolma addressed him.
Terma
were hidden Buddhist treasures, teachings, and relics secreted away hundreds of years earlier to be found by the faithful of future generations. “Lokesh often goes seeking them. Once he stopped me in the middle of a highway and had me leave our truck on the side of the road because he saw a mountaintop shaped like a yak that was the perfect location for
terma.
We didn't return for four days.”