The Old Boys (12 page)

One of these phrases was the name of a cemetery and the location of a grave. The other was a man’s name, Yang Geng Qi. Paul Christopher.

On the way back to the hotel I told David what the man had said to me and what I thought it might mean.

David shrugged. “We can dig up the grave, Horace, but think for a minute. Maybe that’s what they want us to do, so they can grab us in the act and get rid of us forever.”

It was not impossible that he was right. Robbing graves is a serious offense anywhere in the world. In China, with its ancient reverence for last resting places, the penalty might very well be a bullet in the head. All the same, I wanted to know. David shrugged again and went along with me.

We set out for the cemetery in the wee hours of the morning. Even gumshoes have to sleep some time, and ours were exceptionally tired after the workout we had given them that day. They were dozing in the lobby. The receptionist was also asleep, but there was no question of tiptoeing past all three of them. We went out a back door, split up, and made our way through empty and silent streets, a strange and unsettling experience in China, where one never expects the crowd to be absent. It was a moonless night, but the stars were brilliant in the black desert sky. They gave off enough light for us to find our way among the markers.

It took time to find the grave of Yang Geng Qi. We had brought a metal tray from our hotel room and with this clumsy tool we dug through the gritty sand at the head of the grave. I had never before tried to be quiet in China, where noise is as omnipresent as the air itself. At this hour of the night the country was as quiet as sleep itself, and each bite of the tray into the earth sounded like the clash of cymbals.

At
last we found what we were looking for. There was no coffin, just a body wrapped in cloth and trussed with rope. Feeling in the dark, I uncovered the face. Shielding ourselves under my raincoat, we shone flashlights into the grave. We found ourselves looking into the empty eye sockets of a young Han who had been shot through the back of the head. David slit the shroud to the man’s waist. There was a gaping hole in the chest where the heart had been removed and another where his liver used to be. I felt beneath the body. The kidneys were missing, too. This was a criminal whose organs had been harvested immediately after he was executed.

David took several flash photographs of the mutilated corpse, which was well on its way to becoming a mummy.

Clearly Zhang
had
planned to show us a grave before presenting us with Paul’s belongings. But then someone decided to send us ashes instead. A wise precaution.

I wanted to make contact with the Episcopalian again. David and I went back to the restaurant where the fellow had whispered his information. We didn’t really expect to find him there—or if we did, that he would be fool enough to talk to us again—but there was no other place to start. Our minders went with us, of course. To all appearances they had not missed us the night before. Both had still been asleep in the lobby when we returned just before first light. Now they drank tea and watched stolidly as David and I once again ate the coarse barbarian food.

There was no sign of my informant, but David overheard talk among the customers about a buz kashi match. You may have seen this game in the movies or in
National Geographic
—polo as a blood sport with the carcass of a goat as the ball. The match between Tajik horsemen and some Kyrgyz from the north was planned two days hence somewhere in the mountains. The conversation was so free and easy that you might have thought we were in a free country and the two scowling Han policemen sitting against the wall were members of the family. We asked if it was possible for us to see the match. The owner, who had been leading the discussion, replied that we’d be as welcome as the day is long. As a matter of fact, he had an uncle who owned a Toyota
4Runner, and though he could not say for sure, it was possible that his uncle would be willing to drive us up the mountain. He was in the taxi business.

The uncle in his 4Runner arrived at our hotel at daybreak. He was a big sunburnt Tajik named Zikkar who somewhat resembled the Episcopalian, which could mean nothing or mean that they were related—or merely that both men possessed one of the halfdozen or so faces that the whole tribe shared after thousands of years of intermarriage. Zikkar asked for the equivalent of two hundred dollars to drive us up the mountain and back down. This was a large sum by local standards. Since we did not want him to carry passengers for whom he had no respect, David bargained him down to one hundred fifty.

Could he leave immediately? We were ready to go. We were already dressed in woolens and down parkas—it was cold in November even at Ulugqat’s relatively modest altitude. Zikkar did not answer immediately. His eyes were on our two minders, who were sprinting toward us through the crowd like a couple of halfbacks, spinning and dodging pedestrians. They were sleepy-eyed, frantic, panting. The senior minder let loose a torrent of Mandarin, too fast and slangy for me to understand, while the other gave David and me a burning stare designed to make us think of handcuffs and dungeons.

In Mandarin, David said, “We have hired this man to drive us to the buz kashi. We may never have another chance to see such a thing. You and your friend are welcome to come along.”

As if a horn had sounded ending the game, the senior man stopped raving in mid-sentence. He considered the offer for a long moment, then stepped back into the crowd, turning his back in case one of us was a lip reader, and made a call on his cell phone. While he talked, the silent minder placed himself in front of the 4Runner. In moments the senior man reappeared. Without another word, he and his sidekick got into the car as if they had paid for it. The talker got into the front seat. Very politely, I asked him to move to the back with his friend and
David. There was no room for my legs back there. And besides, I had paid for the vehicle. Frozen-faced, he complied.

The buz kashi match would take place in a meadow at a high altitude. There was a road of sorts—actually a narrow track beaten down by hooves over centuries. The 4Runner, which had 200,000 kilometers on the odometer, made slow and bumpy but steady progress on a grade that got closer to the vertical with every turn of the wheels.

It took the better part of the morning to reach the point where, according to Captain Zhang, Paul Christopher had met his end. Zikkar halted by the fateful ravine as if this were a programmed stop on the tour. The gash in the earth was prodigious, with a cold torrent tumbling through mist at its bottom. The stony smell of the rushing water was apprehended as much on the tongue as in the nostrils. A brisk wind was blowing. The air was quite cold now, close to the freezing point and probably well below it on the wind-chill scale. Our minders wasted no time emptying their bladders and jumping back into the heated car. David took pictures. The vociferous minder rolled down a window and shouted at him to stop. This was sensitive country, a border region. We walked up the track a half mile or so, Zikkar trailing along behind us. In Tajik, David asked him if this was a dangerous place to ride a horse.

Zikkar grinned. “Only for a pregnant woman,” he replied. “Or a Han.”

“What about a white man?”

“They ride in cars.”

“Has a white man every fallen off his horse and gone into the ravine?

“A white man?” Zikkar said. He gave us a long look before answering the question. “I don’t think so. But you can ask at the buz kashi.”

Zikkar faced the sun and looked at his shadow. It was about ten o’clock by this human sundial. With a follow-me jerk of his head, he strode down the mountainside toward the 4Runner. The Han
policemen, dressed in cotton trousers and shirts and thin padded jackets, shivered miserably in the backseat.

An hour or so later we came to a notch in the terrain that framed a vista of whitened peaks marching into Afghanistan. According to the map, the altitude here was nine thousand feet. Below us lay an impossibly picturesque valley fenced by the sheer rock walls of snowcapped mountains. The Tajik village on the valley floor consisted of a couple of dozen stone huts straggling alongside a fast-running river. On the other side of the valley stood a half-dozen yurts— round, collapsible shelters made of thick felt.

Zikkar pointed to them: “Kyrgyz.”

The visiting team. The blue smoke of dung fires drifted in the crystal-clear air. Yaks, sheep, and goats wandered about, with a few two-humped Bactrian camels intermingled. The horses, shaggy hammer-headed animals, stood apart in two groups. Zikkar maneuvered the 4Runner through the herd. The animals paid no attention to the stinking machine, which might well have emerged through a seam in time into this ancient world.

David and I were introduced to the village headman, a dignified fellow named Jafargul, who gave David and me cups of warm milk fresh from the ewe. He then invited us inside for more food and drink. Our Han minders were ignored, left to their own devices in the backseat of the car. I would have let them shiver, but Zikkar, a businessman thinking of the future, brought them tea and flatbread, along with a couple of sheepskins for warmth.

The buz kashi match, played mostly inside a cloud of dust, lacked the dramatic close-ups and sound effects of movie versions I had seen, but it was exciting enough. The smell of blood, sweat, dirt and fresh dung added a dimension that movies lack. Through my binoculars I caught glimpses of riders wrestling at a full gallop for the carcass of a young goat. Early in the game, two riders playing tug-of-war with the dead animal pulled off its head. Blood spurted. The man with the severed head pursued the other fellow, beating him on the back with it. As the match progressed, the goat’s legs and tail were pulled off one by one, so it became more
and more difficult to get a grip on the slippery dismembered carcass. Blood-smeared men were knocked off their horses, dragged, trampled, had their teeth knocked out—you could see them spitting incisors into the air. Injured horses writhed on the rocky ground. I have no idea which side won. Mayhem seemed to be the only rule. As far as I could tell, nobody crossed the goal—if there were goals—with what was left of the goat, so maybe the object was not victory but how murderously you played the game.

Injured men had been dragged off the field, but Zikkar assured us that no one had been killed today. “Many broken bones,” he said with a delighted smile. “That’s why they play now, so that they’ll have the whole winter to heal.”

The weather was changing. A great dark-blue bruise appeared above the craggy peaks to the west. The smell of snow was in the air. A few fat flakes were already drifting in on a soft west wind. There was no question of driving back down the mountain in darkness during a snowstorm. Zikkar led us back to the headman’s house, where we would spend the night.

Jafargul awaited us outside his door. Beside him stood two men holding a wriggling sheep. They lifted it into the air, head down, and Jafargul slit its throat. He caught the blood in a bowl, then skinned the sheep with a few economical slashes of his knife, which evidently had been honed to a surgical edge. He then cut it up for the pot and with a dazzling smile of welcome, invited us inside. A dung fire burned cheerfully on the hearth, fumes rising through a smoke hole. The dirt floor, pounded to a sheen by many feet over many years, was covered with bright red-and-black tribal carpets. More carpets hung on the walls. There were no windows. The scene was lit by firelight and the flames of oil lamps. It occurred to me that I was seeing human faces and the mellow vegetable-dye colors in the rugs in a way that few Westerners had seen them since Edison brought the mischief of electric light into the world.

The Tajik believe that they are descendants of the armies of
Alexander the Great, and some of them do have Macedonian looks. Jafargul, for example, had green eyes and thick auburn hair and eyebrows. Women wearing pillbox hats with white veils attached were at work in the kitchen. The veils did not cover their faces. These particular Tajiks are Ismaili Shi’as, followers of the Aga Khan, and they have their own customs. In this house at least, abstinence was not one of them. Jafargul and his guests had a taste for whiskey, and we soon worked our way through the liter of Jack Daniels that David had brought along as emergency rations.