"But Lau has gone beyond speaking."
Except, Shan reflected bitterly, in the last few minutes of her life, when she had undoubtedly spoken through a haze of drugs and pain. It seemed more certain than ever that this had been the secret her killer had wanted, that Bao was on a relentless, bloodthirsty drive to expose the dissidents and their foreign collaborators. And if so, Bao wasn't after all the zheli, but only the boys, finding and killing the boys, because it was a zheli boy named Micah who was the link to the American scientist.
"Bao spoke about the Antiquities Institute."
Najan gave a bitter smile as he finished his cigarette. "They tried to get me to work for them once. Wanted me to prove to the world that the Kharoshthi writing is actually a form of ancient Chinese. They're not scientists, they're propaganda agents, dedicated to fostering the myths. They tell the newspapers that Niya Gazuli was faked by foreign subversives. They would try to prove that cavemen in Africa ate with chopsticks if they thought they could get away with it." He shook his head sadly, then nodded toward Shan and headed back in the direction of the laboratory.
The cell with the thousand-year-old Buddhists had a new visitor when he returned. Lokesh had brought in several lamps and uncovered all the faces. He was reciting a mantra, a prayer for the souls, Shan thought at first, then he saw the joy in his friend's eyes. It was a celebration, not a mourner's chant.
Shan sat across from Lokesh, one of the mummies between them, the man with the dark red beard. Around the man's neck was a chain, bearing a gau that lay on his chest. He wore a heavy vest, with a small pocket from which a cup made of cow horn protruded.
Lokesh looked up with a huge grin. "He waited a thousand years so we could meet him."
Shan started to say that the man's soul had long departed, but he knew his friend understood. It wasn't that he was paying homage to souls that may have been reincarnated twenty times since leaving these frail bodies. It was just that these people were so real. In that moment, if the man had sat up on his blanket, Shan would not have run. He would have wanted to clasp the man's hand.
"Look in the blanket, Xiao Shan," Lokesh said excitedly, lifting a corner of the felt covering the man's lower body. "I know him."
Shan studied his friend uncertainly, then looked back at the mummy. "I don't understand."
"I mean, I know he was man of good deeds. He was a man who had suffered and didn't mind the suffering. He was a man who understood the things that we understand. Look."
As Lokesh raised the felt Shan saw that around the mummified wrist was a string of beads. A Buddhist rosary. Lokesh pulled the blanket away further and pointed to two thick rectangular objects with cracked leather straps, placed beside the man's hips, where the man's hands could reach them if he extended his arms. They were the hand blocks used by pilgrims, the smooth wooden blocks with leather straps into which a pilgrim inserted his hands to protect them while making ten thousand prostrations on the ground each day. Shan had seen identical blocks used by pilgrims along Tibetan roads, along the sacred Barkhor path in Lhasa. From a standing position they would kneel, then place the hands on the ground and drop to a completely prone position, reciting a mantra as they did so, then rise, take one step forward, and repeat the process.
"There's writing on the blocks," Lokesh said. "Tibetan, in the old style. I studied it. It tells his story. This man," —Lokesh seemed almost overcome with emotion as he spoke— "he was going to Mount Kailas," he continued, referring to the holiest of Tibetan places, the father mountain at the edge of the Himalayas. The first of the mountains, the Tibetans called it. "He was going to leave these blocks on the mountain after completing a circuit of prostrations around it, as an offering for the spirits of his daughter, who had died falling from a horse, and his wife, who had died giving birth to his daughter."
Lokesh looked at Shan and sighed. Something had happened, something had stopped the man hundreds of miles from his destination. "He had come far," Lokesh said, admiration in his voice. "His home, it says, was Loulan, one of the old cities, gone now, at the eastern edge of the desert. He had come almost halfway."
It could have been a sandstorm, Shan thought, or the bitter cold of the winter desert that stopped him. It could have been the arrow of a bandit. Or a Chinese soldier.
They sat in quiet reverence for several minutes, with Lokesh sometimes making soulful moaning sounds.
"Do you sense it, my friend?" Lokesh asked. "It makes some part of me feel alive like never before." The old man seemed to struggle to find his words. "It's as though when they were put in the ground they were wondering would the world survive, would people like us still be here. For all the pain, the wars, the famines, the sandstorms, the persecutions. And now they emerged to find out."
They fell silent again, in a strange communion with the thousand-year-old Buddhist, then a thought seemed to capture Lokesh. He sobered and looked up at Shan. "If I knew this," he said solemnly, "if I knew in a thousand years another human could reach and touch me this way, like a link in the chain of the goodness in souls, I would lie down and die right now."
Shan remembered Lokesh's words at Senge Drak. Maybe humans existed, he had said, just to keep virtue alive and to pass it on to someone else.
* * *
They ate outside, as the sun set, by a small brazier into which Deacon set a cannister of gas that burned like a stove. His wife made flat cakes of buckwheat flour, then fried together an assortment of canned goods that Deacon produced with a festive air from his rucksack. Bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, and even pineapple wound up in the same pan, served on the buckwheat cakes.
Shan was ravenous.
"So you had an audience with the Jade Bitch," Marco observed as he joined Shan on a flat rock. There were no plates, no chairs, no tables— nothing, Shan realized, that could not be carried inside quickly if an aircraft approached. Between bites Shan explained what Xu had said, and done, at her office.
"Why would she think you were from Beijing?" Abigail Deacon asked.
"Listen to his voice, woman," Marco interjected. "It has the tones of Beijing."
"That," Shan agreed, "but mostly because she expected someone from Beijing. From Public Security headquarters."
"The boot squad reservations at Glory Camp," Dr. Najan muttered.
Shan looked at him, considering the implications of his words.
"You have friends who watch over you," Shan suggested. "Friends with laptop computers."
The Uighur nodded soberly. "Brave friends. Named Mao."
"Xu had evidence in her office," Shan said. "Lau's things, from the school."
"But Lau drowned," Marco said. "That is what Xu thinks."
"The prosecutor had looked at the evidence," Shan said. "The statement that she failed to report to the school. The horse on the trail. The jacket. And her identity papers."
"Identity papers?" Jakli said with alarm in her voice. "We never—"
"Public Security reported them turned in the day the jacket was found. Taken out of the mud on the river bank near Yoktian."
"Who turned them in?"
"Lieutenant Sui."
"The killer!" Jakli gasped. "Lau's murderer planted the papers with Sui, to complete the story."
"Or Sui was the killer," Marco said grimly. "I've seen him on a horse. He could ride well."
"Impossible," Jakli argued, "the knobs would have been all over Karachuk if he had seen things there."
"Not if it was just one knob," Shan suggested, "on a special mission. Sui, or one like him. Xu thought there were secret knobs operating in Yoktian," he reminded them.
"A secret mission to kill a teacher?" Deacon asked.
"A special mission to kill a Tibetan nun," Shan said.
"A nun who becomes a teacher," Jakli observed, "not such a strange story in the border country." She said it tentatively, as if trying to convince herself. "There are more Tibetans here than people think, they change their identity to be safe. They have good reasons."
"Some can leave their past behind," Shan said. "Some can't. And it wasn't just about her past. Perhaps something from her past was the link, the trigger that got the knobs interested in the zheli, a way to find what the knobs were already seeking. What boot squads were seeking," he added in a near whisper.
No one spoke for a moment. No one needed to be told what the boot squads were looking for. They watched the blaze of crimson that was all that remained of the day as it faded into pink and gold and then grey. The American woman rose, then settled on the sand in front of her husband, who rubbed her shoulders.
"Three boys dead," Marco said gravely.
"Micah's out there," Abigail Deacon said, worry in her voice now.
"He's all right, Warp," her husband said reassuringly. "He's in the high mountains. Untouchable. Not long until the full moon, and we'll be together. A new performance."
Warp wrapped her arm around his leg. "You and your damned crickets," she said. "Micah's going to wind up with a bedroom full of insects when we go home."
"Good company. Smarter than fish," quipped Deacon. "Good joss."
His wife laughed, a soft infectious laugh. "My father kept crickets one summer," she said, "used them for fish bait." Deacon, who seemed to have heard the story before, lowered his hands over her face, and she playfully batted them away. "My mother hated them but she let him keep them so long as they were away from the house. One day he left a can of them in the bedroom, while he took a shower, and forgot them. A few days later he puts on his underwear and it falls to pieces. Every pair, full of holes eaten by the crickets. He never said anything. But he got rid of all the crickets that day."
"See?" Marco said with a laugh. "Good luck. Good luck for your mother."
They laughed. They all laughed, even Shan made a sound like a laugh. Marco told a story of how a pet squirrel had made a nest in his mother's only surviving dress from Russia, and they laughed again. Jakli explained how Nikki had once caught an albino mouse for her, and when he got to her camp it had given birth to five tiny pink mice in his pocket. Dr. Najan spoke of a pet pika that always chewed off the buttons of his mother's clothes and took them to his box as treasure.
As he listened a little lump grew in Shan's throat, and a stranger feeling in his heart. What was it? They were happy and he was happy for them. But there was something else. Something they were doing had reached a place inside, a hollow place, another of the chambers that had been unoccupied for so long he had forgotten how to open it. But once it had been full, once it had been overflowing. He recognized the place at last, in a pang of emotion. It was family, it was the way they spoke so openly and laughed so readily, the way Marco and the Americans and even Jakli were so familiar and confiding of the little things, the personal things. Long ago, Shan had shared it with his father and mother, but never with his wife, never with his son.
"How about you, Inspector?" Marco asked in a jovial tone. "Ever have a pet?"
It took a moment before he realized the Eluosi was speaking to him. Shan looked out over the dunes, mottled in evening shadow, like a rolling sea. It seemed like he spent a long time, exploring the forgotten chamber, but they all waited in silence.
"Not a pet," he heard himself say in a near whisper. "In the China of my boyhood you never had enough food to keep your own belly full. Pets never survived. But when I was young my father and I would go to the river and watch the world go by. In the fall farmers would bring ducks to market from far inland. They would clip the wings of the ducks, thousands of ducks, and herd them downriver like vast flocks of sheep, the shepherds in sampans wearing black shirts and straw hats. Once I cried because I realized all the ducks were going to be killed and eaten." He sighed and looked toward the stars. "My father said don't be sad, that for a duck, it was a grand adventure, to float hundreds of miles out into the world, that the ducks would have chosen the river even if they knew their fate. Then he looked all about, very serious, to be sure no one listened, and told me a big secret. That sometimes ducks escaped and made it all the way to the sea and became famous pirate ducks."
No one spoke. No one laughed. He glanced at Marco, who was just nodding toward the horizon, as if he knew all about pirate ducks.
"After that," Shan continued, "every time we went to the river we took paper and inkstones and brushes. We wrote poems sometimes, about the grandeur of the river and how the moon looked when it rose over the silver water. Sometimes I just wrote directions to the sea. Then we folded the paper into little boats and sailed them into the duck herds."
They watched the stars. After a few minutes Marco outlined with his finger the constellations and challenged the Americans to tell the English names. The Northern Bushel they instantly knew as the Big Dipper, and the White Tiger as Orion the Hunter. The game continued good-naturedly. The Porch Way was Cassiopeia, and the Azure Dragon, Sagittarius.
