With a chill Shan saw the tiny red light that indicated that the video camera, now on the shelf, was still operating. She had been recording their conversation. But now she retrieved the camera, shut it off, and returned it to the shelf, facing the wall.
She came back to sit not at her desk but in the wooden chair beside Shan. "What children?" she asked. Her voice was still hard, and filled with suspicion.
"A boy named Suwan, nine years old, shot in the head. A boy in the Kunlun mountains, named Alta, beaten and stabbed to death. The same age. Both part of her orphan class."
Xu frowned. "You're desperate, comrade." She had apparently decided not to believe him. "There have been no reports."
"They were with nomad families."
Xu's eyes seemed to drill into his skull. He broke eye contact and stared at the bird again. "Impossible. You should investigate a bit more before concocting your stories. The orphans have a new teacher. Everything continues as normal. But of course you know that. You asked my secretary about him."
"Yet, Comrade Prosecutor," Shan said very slowly, "you are concerned about Lau. About how she died." He glanced back at the evidence table. "She was murdered. And now her murderer is killing her children."
Xu frowned again and sighed. "Fiction. Concocted by the reactionaries, to make the people fear the assimilation programs. Lau died in an unfortunate accident. When the river waters recede this winter we will find her body." She opened a desk drawer and retrieved a pad of paper. "Write your statement, comrade," she said. "You've done it before, no doubt. We will consult it in your sentencing." She paused a moment, then tossed the pad toward him. "Maybe you did think the children were in danger. Say that. It could be useful. Bad elements put the children in danger. They engage in the patterns of feudalism. Distrust of authority. Blood feuds. Obsession with icons of dying cultures," she suggested as she extended the pad toward him. "Reactionaries, all of them. Those who resist our efforts to integrate all peoples."
Shan did not touch the pad. "Is it possible she was a friend of yours?" he asked tentatively. Xu had written a memo to defend Lau.
Xu did not answer.
"I saw her body," Shan said. "She was beaten on her shins. Tortured, before being drugged and shot." He paused to let the words sink in. "What are you going to do about her children?"
This time when Xu stared at him her eyes blinked, then she looked down. For a fleeting moment there seemed to be a glimmer of uncertainty on her face.
"She was getting old," the prosecutor said. "She was having trouble with her heart."
"Who told you that?" He realized she had not answered a single one of his questions.
"There was a meeting of the Agricultural Council, after we decided she had died. It was mentioned in a speech honoring her on her death."
She stared at him as he shook his head slowly. "Maybe you should ask your friend Bao about the orphans," Shan suggested.
"What do you mean?"
"I had an old friend in Beijing. Forty years with the Ministry of Justice. Said I should always assume that Public Security knows ten times more than they tell the public, five times more than they tell their colleagues at other government offices, and twice as much as they tell the Chairman."
Xu acknowledged the point with a sour smile, then pulled a form from a pile of papers on her desk and began writing on it with the stub of a pencil. "Maybe I will find time to explore your imagination further, comrade. Not today. At Glory Camp. They will hold you in a special place, alone, so you can more clearly consider all you will need to confess to."
"I have a better idea. Let me go."
Xu gave a cold smile and kept on filling out the detention form. "Shan," she said without looking up. "A common name. It tells me nothing."
"You know Bao is lying to you," Shan said. "You just don't know how much. You think you should do something about Lau. What if what happened to Lau is connected to Sui being killed? Let me go and I will find out. I promise to meet you again, soon. Here. You think because Bao is Public Security that there is nothing you can do. But there is. You can let me continue."
Xu's pencil stopped writing. "Maybe I was wrong about you," she said. "The Brigade runs a lao gai camp deep in the desert. Maybe that is where I should—" Her words were cut off by a woman's scream. There were shouts from the outer office, and the pounding of running feet. There was another high-pitched scream, then another. Xu stood at her desk, then quickly stepped to her door and opened it. The outer office was empty. At the sound of one more scream she ran to the corridor and down the stairs toward the sounds. Shan followed her, then stopped in the corridor and ran to its end, where he quickly found the back stairway.
In less than a minute he was running down an alleyway. He emerged onto the street a hundred feet from the Ministry office. Traffic in the street was stopped, the cars and trucks abandoned by their drivers. A crowd swarmed around the front of the Ministry building. Shan edged forward and stood on the running board of an abandoned truck to see over the crowd.
"Murder!" someone shouted.
He saw the prosecutor emerge from the building, followed by Miss Loshi and the lean man from the outer office. On the steps in front of Xu a man and woman in herders' clothing stood, the man holding a bundle in his raised arms, a bloody blanket wrapped around a young boy. The boy was dead.
Chapter Ten
Someone grabbed his arm and began pulling. He stood, resisting, staring at the dead boy. The woman beside the man with the boy began shouting at the prosecutor. Then she turned and began shouting at the rapidly growing crowd. Some people were fleeing, Shan saw, trying to urgently weave through the crowd, to escape the square. Han. The Han Chinese were fleeing.
"Niya!" someone shouted, and the crowd began to loudly chant the name. "Niya! Niya! Niya!" The name from the posters, the name of the red-haired woman he had seen on the posters.
The knobs, he suddenly remembered. There were knobs with machine guns. He turned and saw the two grey uniforms on a balcony overlooking the far side of the square. One appeared to be speaking on a portable radio. The other held his gun at the ready.
On the Ministry steps the herder with the boy still stood, silently holding the boy as though presenting the body to the prosecutor. He was crying. The dead boy's eyes were partially open, as if the boy were squinting, trying to see something in the distance. His shirt was torn and stained with blood. There was a hole in the center of his forehead.
Someone grabbed Shan's arm with two hands now and would not let go. It was Jakli. He looked back at the dead boy and let himself be pulled down from the truck and led away.
They walked fast, though not so fast as to attract attention, past four blocks of pressed earth and cinder block structures in various stages of disrepair, the shops, garages, restaurants and dreary offices with grey metal shutters that kept Yoktian alive. He asked her who the boy was but she said nothing. He asked who Niya was, and then he saw she was choked with emotion, her eyes moist, her jaw clenched as though to stifle a sob.
Jakli led him into a compound of four one-story buildings surrounded by a waist-high wire fence. A concrete walkway, so badly buckled and split that Jakli stayed on the dirt beside it, led to the mud-walled building that sat in the center of the compound, flanked on three sides by identical structures. Shan stopped at the entrance and looked at the wooden sign that had been fastened over the doorway. It had once held a slogan, but half the sign had blown away, so that all remained were the words
Strengthens Children.
Jakli did not realize he had stopped until she was twenty feet down the darkened hallway. She turned with her hands on her hips, waiting.
"Was the boy from the zheli?" Shan called out.
She looked up and down the hall with worry in her eyes, then stepped closer. "An orphan, yes," she replied in a taut, melancholy voice. "His name was Kublai. Staying with a clan about twenty miles into the mountains. He was watching sheep and didn't come back. When they went to look they saw his body below a cliff, with a dead lamb in his arms. He had fallen, they thought, probably while rescuing the lamb. But when they retrieved the body they saw he had been shot. The lamb," she added with a sudden, deep despair, "the lamb was shot too."
"Who is Niya?" Shan asked again. "What does she have to do with the boy?"
"My cousins reached four of the zheli families and warned them away," she said, looking at the floor. "Malik brought a second boy to hide at Red Stone. The boy had tied two mastiffs to him, as if they would stop the killer. Some Maos are there at Akzu's camp now, guarding the boys. Other Maos are looking in the mountains too. The children are so hard to find."
"Are the boys connected to this Niya?"
But Jakli seemed not to hear again. She turned and walked, more slowly, stopping at a door near the end of the hall. Someone sat on the floor beside the door. The Mao with the gold teeth, who had brought the shoes. As Jakli bent to speak with him, Shan pushed the door open.
Inside, Lokesh looked up from a simple wooden table and offered a silent nod of greeting. It was a small room, with a window that looked over the schoolyard toward the south, toward the snow-capped Kunlun. Its walls were lined with photographs, at least two dozen. There were horses, many pictures of horses. There was a picture of a large Buddha statue, photographs of mosques, and even a reproduction of an old painting of Lao Tzu, the sage of Tao, riding an ox. At the top of a tall metal bookcase a string of prayer flags had been fastened, which draped down the side of the shelves.
Lokesh held a bell in his hands, an old bell cast of bronze, the tip of its handle ending in a familiar scepter-like shape. It was a dorje bell, used in Tibetan ritual.
"She forgot her bell," Lokesh said grimly, with a meaningful glance toward Shan. The peal of a dorje bell was said to drive away evil. Beside the bell on the table was a ball of thread, perhaps three inches in diameter, with red, green, and yellow threads intertwined. Not thread, really, Shan knew, but a sacred emblem used by some Buddhists to wrap around ritual implements as a means of invoking wisdom. One of Lokesh's hands left the bell and stroked the ball of thread. Further down on the table was a large book, a Koran, and a black dopa, one of the Muslim skullcaps.
"What is it you seek, my friend?" Shan asked the old Tibetan. His words came out almost as a sigh, cast out on the wave of emotion he still felt from seeing the third boy. He knew Lokesh had come down from Senge Drak, had chosen not to go back to the safety of Lhadrung, because he was looking for something, something he had hoped to find at the school.
"It is hard to put into words," Lokesh said in a hoarse voice, shaking his head, as if something was telling him not to speak. He gripped the bell with both hands. "In its physical emanation it is the Jade Basket. But it is said to be able to transform itself, if it needs to, for protection."
"Protection of what?" Shan asked.
Lokesh's brow wrinkled. "On the outside," he said with difficulty, as though the words caused him pain, "the last time anyone saw it, it looked like a silver gau. Open it and there is a finely carved basket of jade, and inside that a place for a prayer."
The last boy's shirt, Kublai's shirt, had been torn, he remembered as he played the image from the Ministry steps over in his mind. Like that of Alta and Suwan.
"That's what you came for?" Shan asked. "This Jade Basket? Is that what you must take back?" Is that what Lau died for? he almost asked. For an artifact? There were symbols, he knew, objects of great power, of great veneration, for which devout Buddhists would gladly give their lives to protect. Indeed, dying for such objects would add great merit for the next incarnation.
"It's not safe to speak about it," Lokesh said, still shaking his head. "If you don't know how to approach it, then the closer you get, the farther it is." He looked up at Shan, clearly struggling painfully with something inside. "Don't—" His voice choked off and he stared at the bell with a doleful, perplexed expression.
"Did Lau have it? Is that why you came here?" Shan asked.
But Lokesh just stared intensely at the bell in his hands. He seemed beyond hearing again.
Shan walked about the office, then stood in the doorway, surveying it. Xu had been here. Public Security had probably been here. Managing Director Ko had certainly been here. Xu had taken what seemed to be Lau's personal effects. But Lokesh had found two more, he believed, the ball of thread and bell. They had been hidden in plain sight, camouflaged with her cultural instructional materials. From behind him in the hallway he heard the Mao speaking to Jakli, pointing to something on the office opposite Lau's. He stepped to the other side of the hall to investigate. The Mao was pointing to a handwritten sign taped to the glass on the door. In two-inch characters someone had written one of the Great Helmsman's most famous slogans. Religion is the Opiate of the Masses. There was a nameplate on the door. Committee Chairman Hu, it said. Shan remembered the plump, worried Han teacher he had met at Glory Camp.
