Shan wandered back into Lau's room. From the end of the table he picked up a piece of paper. A printout of names.
"The zheli," Jakli explained over his shoulder. "A list from the computer of all the orphans she worked with, and the zheli class schedule" She pointed to three names on the list. Suwan, Alta, and Kublai.
"Did Lau use the computer?" Shan asked.
Jakli paused and pulled the list closer. "No. She didn't like computers."
"Or, at least, didn't trust them," Shan suggested.
Jakli nodded as she examined the list. "Someone else did this."
"It makes it easier," Shan said in a low voice and saw the question in Jakli's eyes. "For the killer." The killer had the list, available at any Brigade computer, and only needed the location of the zheli members. Which was why he had tortured Lau. He studied the schedule. The zheli had two class meetings left for the year, one in a week, and the other five days later, both at a place called Stone Lake. He pointed at the entries.
"At the edge of the desert," Jakli explained. "It was a tradition of Lau's, to end the season of classes with two sessions there. To understand the desert better, she said. It's too hot to go there in the summer."
"The boys," Shan said. "Which are the boys? I wasn't certain before, but now it seems clear. The killer is only attacking boys."
Jakli studied the list and pointed out nine more names. She held her hands together and twisted her fingers as she stared at the names, as though she had seen a ghost. It was not a student directory. It was a death list.
There were notes fastened on the wall, torn from student workbooks.
Thank you, auntie,
one said,
for showing me that the desert is still alive. My baby bird sang a song today
, another said. Two seemed to be poems.
While my horse drank,
it said,
I saw an old farmer, so asleep a mouse nibbled at his whiskers.
Another was written with a more mature, artful calligraphy.
In the mountains
, it said,
old men wait, with the wisdom of snow.
Shan looked out the window. The building across the courtyard to the south had low drifts of sand along its walls. Beyond them, he gazed at the Kunlun, toward Senge Drak. Jakli had left Gendun there that morning, sitting on the sentinel stone on top of the mountain.
He sensed someone step behind him. He did not turn but saw the tumble of long dark hair from the corner of his eye. Jakli silently reached onto the wall and removed the second poem that he had admired, the one about wise old men. She folded it, and put it inside her shirt. He watched as she retrieved a chair from the table and studied the montage of photographs on the wall. After a moment she set the chair down in front of the wall, climbed it, and pulled down a photograph of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. She handed it to him with sad smile and stepped down. The photograph was stiff and heavy. He turned it over. On the back was affixed a photograph of a red-robed, balding man with spectacles, wearing a serene smile. The Dalai Lama. Jakli used her fingernails to slit the tape that held the secret photograph and put it in her pocket.
Suddenly the light in the office was switched off. The Mao with the gold teeth was at the door, silently pointing out the window. People had begun filing into the courtyard, arranging themselves along the wall of the opposite building. Jakli froze, then darted to the wall, and pressed against it, as if to hide.
It was knobs, herding children out of the school. Thirty or forty students had apparently been pulled out of classrooms with their teachers, who cowered in the doorway to the courtyard. The students were being arranged in a single line along the wall. One knob officer was shouting at them to be quiet, while another stood with a video camera, sweeping its lens along the faces of the children. As they watched, the youngest children, perhaps seven years and younger, were dismissed and sent running back to their teachers. Another group of older children, teenagers, was dismissed a moment later. The knobs began talking to the fifteen or twenty children who remained, one man speaking as another recorded the interview with the camera.
"It's all right," the Mao said. "Just stay quiet."
"They know the zheli's not here," Jakli said.
"Sure," the Mao said, "But some of the children may know how to find them. For the Poverty Scheme, the knobs are probably saying. Have to round up the orphan children, for their own good. Like the wild horses," he added bitterly.
Shan looked back toward the table. Lokesh was watching the children with anticipation in his eyes, as if perhaps he was thinking of going to them. Had the Mao told him about the third child? Shan wondered.
As if reading his mind Jakli stepped to the table and sat across from Lokesh. She placed a hand over his and shook it until Lokesh looked at her. "Another boy," she announced gently. "Another boy has been killed in the mountains."
When she had finished explaining what she knew, Lokesh sat staring at the dorje bell, lost in his thoughts again, more forlorn than ever. Shan leaned over Jakli. "The boy. Was he missing a shoe?"
"I don't know. Is it important?"
"The other two, they each had a missing shoe."
"What kind of shoe?"
He shrugged. "Just shoes." He thought a moment, then told her about the wooden tablet Bao had found and his reaction to it. "Suwan had one," Shan said. "It was shattered by his killer."
Jakli looked up with new worry in her face, then stood and stepped to the bookcase. She retrieved a photograph of a horse with a wooden frame from the top shelf. Not a frame, Shan saw as she held it out, but a flat piece of wood onto which the photo had been carefully taped to give the appearance of a frame. Jakli turned it over to reveal the wedge shape on its reverse side. Another of the tablets with the ancient writing.
"It's called Kharoshthi, this writing. From the people who lived here two thousand years ago. Sometimes the tablets are uncovered in the desert."
He reported Bao's reaction when he had found one of the tablets on Prosecutor Xu's desk and how Xu also had several of Lau's personal effects.
Lokesh looked up. "What? What did she have?" he asked in a strained, hurried voice.
"Not a gau," Shan said. "Books. A little jade horse. A pen case."
"A pen case?" Lokesh asked urgently, leaning forward. "Copper? With turquoise circles?"
Shan shook his head and studied his friend in confusion. "White metal. With coral."
Lokesh grimaced as if in pain and looked back at the bell.
Shan's eyes drifted back to the wooden tablet in Jakli's hand. He asked what Bao had meant when he had asked about the Antiquities Institute.
"The People's Antiquities Institute," she said. "It's a group of government scientists, archaeologists with Party memberships."
"I don't understand," Shan said. "Why would he say it has to do with Westerners?"
Jakli looked up with new alarm in her eyes. "Westerners? He said that?" She shook her head slowly. "It was the Americans who gave the tablets to Lau, enough for her to distribute them to the zheli. It was part of her helping them understand who we are."
"But to Major Bao it is an act of treason," Shan said, his mind suddenly racing. He had been wrong about Xu. She had not known about Sui, nor about the two dead boys. It could have been Bao all along, Bao and the boot squads searching for those he considered traitors to China. He must have found a link between Lau and the Americans and might be following the zheli to the Americans. Shan remembered the poem about the lama and Bao's reaction to the wooden tablet on Xu's desk. Evidence of treason. To Bao, finding traitors would be more important than finding Sui's killer, at least temporarily, if he were on the verge of closing in on his traitors. Shan and Jakli exchanged an alarmed glance.
"The Americans have to be warned," Jakli gasped. "They go to the zheli class sometimes."
"To the zheli?" Shan asked in disbelief. "Surely it would be too dangerous."
"I was there with Fat Mao when Lau tried to talk them out of it. The Americans said they wanted to talk about their work to the children, to the next generation, to let them know there are other people on the planet who care about them."
Their work. What was it the Americans were doing that could so infuriate Bao? Digging up ancient tablets? Looking at old cloth?
"They said it was worth the risk," Jakli added, "to have children listen."
Shan remembered Deacon's strange words. He and his wife had come to Xinjiang to stop hiding. "Maybe you should go to the Americans," he said. "I must help the children."
Jakli gazed at him, her eyes widening in realization. "But what you said about Bao, it means that it is all about the Americans, about following a chain of Lau's students to the Americans. The children are hiding. You will never find them. But if we can't find the children, then we must go to the other end of the chain and work backwards. Find the Americans, and trace back their link to the children. Cut off the trail that Bao is following. It's what we have to do. And then," she added with a determined glint, "then we get you back in time to cross to Nepal."
Suddenly a figure appeared in the doorway, a thin young woman in the grey uniform of a knob. They froze, all except Lokesh, who stood and rang the
dorje
bell, the bell that drove away demons. He rang it loudly, repeatedly, stepping forward while extending the bell toward her, and with each of his steps the woman retreated, until finally she turned and bolted down the hall. Jakli grabbed Lokesh, who was laughing now, and they ran down the hall in the opposite direction.
* * *
Karachuk felt different this time, Shan thought. There was still the excitement, the feeling of entering a lost century, but there was also something else. Not fear, but close to fear. A sense of foreboding in the wind.
Jakli seemed to sense it too. She had maintained a brooding silence for much of the journey to the lost city and now paused warily as they passed out of the corridor of ruins and saw the domed building where Shan had met Marco. She looked at the sky, which was grey and unnaturally dark for mid afternoon, and frowned, then nodded toward a small spiral of dust, a tiny whirlwind that was scudding toward the wall behind them. "See one of those wind demons at night," she said, "when the moon is just right, and you'll be sure you've seen a ghost." She offered a half smile as she spoke, but it did little to ease the tension from her face.
Lokesh, standing in front of them, stared at the spinning zephyr. "When I was a boy," he said solemnly, "an old man told me that whirlwinds are one of the ten thousand forms that spirits may take. It is the way some souls move about. Inside, there is a brilliant seed of awareness." He studied the wind devil intently, as though trying to recognize something within it. "They can appear suddenly, like a thought, and then just—" Lokesh shrugged as the spiral passed over the outcropping and was gone from view, "just pass us by."
Shan looked at the path of the wind devil. It seemed the story of everything that had happened since he had left his mountain in central Tibet. Awareness passing him by.
Through his strange mix of emotions, Lokesh had understood they had to move quickly. There was no doubt now that the killer was still at work, and the remaining zheli boys had to be found and protected. The Mao with the gold teeth had also understood, and as soon as they cleared the school, he had jogged away toward town. But Jakli was right. If Shan had less than two days, he had to focus on the Americans. If Bao was the killer, he was only interested in the zheli and the Jade Basket as a way of finding subversives. Ultimately his goal would be the illegal Americans and those who helped them. If so, that was where the answers lay, with the Americans.
The ruins were empty. They walked stealthfully, like thieves, wary of the slightest sound and movement, sometimes starting from the occasional gasp of excitement from Lokesh as he gazed on the ruins. Jakli led Shan with short uncertain steps into Osman's inn. The stuffed chair and tables were still there, even the chess set, but all sign of recent use had been removed. Sand had been thrown on the tabletops. A search party would know it had been inhabited more recently than the remainder of the city, but would not know if it had been last week or ten years before.
No one had reclaimed Karachuk since the hurried exodus only forty-eight hours before. "Wasted. We wasted the trip," Jakli said in frustration as they stepped outside. "No one's—" She stopped as Shan pulled her arm and pointed to the corral, where Lokesh stood near the fence. He was holding a dark brown lump in his palm, wearing a victorious grin. "It's fresh," he called out, putting the lump under his nose. "Today!" It was camel dung.
As they hurried toward the corral Lokesh cocked his head toward the rocks at the back of the corral. "This place," he said with the same enthusiasm, "it is wonderfully full of spirits!" It took a moment before Shan could discern the object of his friend's attention, in the shadows near the top of the rock. A large grey creature, watching them intently.
"Not a spirit," Jakli said with new energy in her voice. "Osman's dog." She eagerly scanned the rocks. "Osman didn't go. He's the protector of Karachuk."
