"The prosecutor's car drove by fifteen minutes ago. She stopped and let someone out," Jakli reported, nodding toward the tea shop across the road.
Shan circled around the rear of the garage and crossed at the end of the compound to reach a small window in the side of the shop. A well-dressed woman sat at the table by the front window, the only one of the shop's tables which was occupied. In one corner an old man with a long thin beard and a black dopa cap sat by a small gas stove, leaning against the wall, asleep. Shan stepped inside and took the empty chair across from Loshi.
"It's Miss Loshi, I believe," he said. "My name is Shan. We spoke at the prosecutor's office."
The young woman, so engrossed in watching out the front window that she had not noticed him, gave a startled gasp. Instead of replying, she raised something from her lap, a small black oblong object with a two-inch stub extending from one end. A cellular telephone. She held it in both hands, her wrists on the edge of the table, extending it like a shield.
"In ten, maybe twenty years, they might get around to installing transmission towers for those phones in this region," Shan observed, attempting a good-natured tone. "Maybe longer. Public Security doesn't want them to become too popular in places like this."
Loshi looked at him, then glanced uneasily outside.
Shan studied the nervous young woman. She had heavy makeup on her eyelids, and an expensive gold chain hung over her bright red silk blouse. Prosecutor Xu's security.
Loshi moved forward on her seat. "I know that. It doesn't work in town either. But most people don't know. I was talking to a herder. It scared him. He said he thought it was just something that Han used to summon other Han. He said he's never seen anyone but a Han with one, except Americans on television," she explained with a satisfied air. "So, see. It works."
"You're the prosecutor's secretary," Shan said. "Did she have secretarial work for you on the drive here?"
But Loshi kept looking at her phone. "They work in Shanghai. And Hong Kong. Everyone has them in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong you can send a fax with one."
"Or is it because she trusts only you?" Shan wondered out loud.
"You're not supposed to talk to me. Talk to the prosecutor."
"You are here. The prosecutor is not here."
"I know people too. Just like the prosecutor. I work for the Ministry of Justice too."
"A big responsibility."
"I get special awards sometimes," she said, as if hoping to intimidate him. "Secret awards."
Shan remembered something else about Loshi. Ko Yonghong of the Brigade was taking her for rides in his car without a roof, like in American movies.
"Do you know about the dead boys, Miss Loshi?"
The girl seemed to be struggling. She put the telephone on the table and pushed the buttons, then put it to her ear in a strange pantomime, as if practicing for when she arrived in the real world. "I liked Auntie Lau," she said into the mouthpiece, as though speaking to someone on the phone. "I was sick once, when I went to a council meeting with the prosecutor. Auntie Lau gave me some herbs and cured me."
"Did you see her only that once?"
"Sometimes she came to town. She was always smiling. She gave me a book of poems written by retired soldiers." Loshi put the phone down. "I guess I never knew anyone who smiled so much. Like an old beggar, she smiled. You know."
Shan looked at her uncertainly. Like an old beggar. She meant like one of the old nuns and monks who used to roam Chinese streets seeking alms. Did her whole generation remember the monks that way, just as beggars? He watched the street. Jakli was speaking with the men at one of the tables. There was a horse-drawn wagon parked in front of the garage now, partially loaded with hay. A man was pumping air into one of its rubber tires.
"Were you born here, Miss Loshi?" Shan asked. "In Xinjiang?"
She shook her head absently. "We're from the coast. The ocean. North of Shanghai. Technically, I was born here, but we're from Shantung Province. My father was sent to manage a factory in Kashgar many years ago. Some day I'll go to Shantung. Prosecutor Xu says she could get me transferred, if we keep maintaining our quota of resolved cases."
"You'd rather be in the east?"
"Back home? Sure."
Home. Loshi had never been there, but Shantung was home. He should write to the Chairman.
Dear Esteemed Comrade. After fifty years we now have conclusive proof that the experiment of absorbing the western territories has failed. Because Loshi wants to go home.
"What about the prosecutor? Does she want to get transferred too?"
Miss Loshi made a sly smile and opened a nylon case on the table beside her. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. She hesitated, then offered one to Shan. He shook his head. "She's not going anywhere. I'm leaving soon. But Comrade Xu—" She shrugged and exhaled two sharp streams of smoke from her nostrils. "Longest serving prosecutor in all of Xinjiang, in one post. Twelve years. In Yoktian, of all places."
Shan wondered if the young woman understood what she was saying, or was it just because Yoktian, in Loshi's world, was not a fashionable place to be? Twelve years in her post meant Xu was in career trouble, that she had been sent here, or remained here, because she had fallen out of favor. He recalled Bao's tone when he had reminded Xu of political commentary made at a conference in Turpan. If you neglect your essential duties, Bao had said, no matter how hard you worked, you are a liability to the state. But Xu was a zealot, the Jade Bitch. She kept the rice camps full. She shot at prayer flags from helicopters. What essential duty had Bao been referring to?
Shan glanced at the cigarette package on the table. "They're expensive," he observed. They were American.
Loto gai—
Camels.
Loshi seemed pleased that he had noticed. "I got them from Ko yesterday. To apologize to me about the sports car. He had to give it to that Major Bao."
Shan almost asked her to repeat the words. "Major Bao? He gave his sports car to Bao?" he asked incredulously.
"You know." Loshi shrugged. "Public Security. Ko said he would get another one soon." Her breath tightened and she leaned toward the window. A black car, Xu's Red Flag sedan, was pulling to a stop in front of the garage.
Shan stared a moment longer, unable to comprehend why Ko would give his expensive car to a man who was not even a friend, who was a rival in many ways. "I'll go around the back," he said in a conspiratorial tone, and stood. "I won't tell her we spoke."
Loshi gave him a nervous, uncertain smile, cupped her hands over the cell phone, and looked back out the window.
Shan watched from the side of the tea house as the chess players at the table scattered the instant the prosecutor stepped out of the driver's seat. She stood and surveyed the compound, hands on her hips, then sat at the abandoned table, putting a small canvas bag on the table beside her. Moments later Shan stepped around the corner of the garage and joined her.
"He came back that day and asked about you." Xu said immediately, venom already in her voice. "Major Bao. He was still angry. Not just angry. Enraged. Said he should have arrested you. I asked him why. Said you could jeopardize a confidential investigation. He demanded more information about you."
"What did you tell him?" Shan asked.
"That you were one of my informers," Xu said, and paused, as if for effect. "But he wanted your name, your work unit." The prosecutor lit a cigarette, a thick unfiltered kind, the sort factory workers smoked. "I told him it might jeopardize a confidential investigation," she said with a sour smile. She stared smugly at Shan as she let the smoke drift out of her mouth. "But I have a friend in the Ministry in Beijing. Nearly ready to retire. I called her. There was an Inspector Shan once, she said, Inspector General of the Ministry of Economy. A fighting dog sort of investigator. The kind everyone hates." She inhaled on the cigarette again and examined him. "You know. Impractical. Incapable of prioritizing for the socialist order."
It was a familiar phrase. One of the idioms of
tamzing
, the struggle sessions where individuals were confronted with their shortcomings as citizens and their remedies beaten into them, figuratively and otherwise.
Shan saw that his hands had done it again, unconsciously made a mudra, as if trying to tell him something. The fingers were clasped, the middle fingers raised upward. Diamond of the Mind. "Prioritization for the Party, prioritization for the state, prioritization for the workplace," he recited the equally familiar refrain that had been shouted at him more than once from political verse books. "I saw an advertisement for a book once in a Western magazine," he said. "Getting your office organized in ten easy lessons." He looked at her with a stony expression. "Kind of the same thing."
She offered an icy smile. "This Inspector Shan, he's said to have taken on Party bosses, maybe even investigated them. Said to have been made to disappear." She opened her mouth and let the smoke curl around her lips.
"The advantage of disappearing," Shan said, "is that afterward expectations are so much lower." He stared at his hands. "All the zheli boys are in jeopardy," he said. "More could be killed."
"This Shan. My friend called the Ministry of Economy. The main thing people say about this Shan is good riddance. He made everyone's life difficult. As hard as a senior Party member. But when he was offered Party membership he turned it down."
"The killer is after the boys. Only the boys." He looked back at the tea house, where Loshi sat watching through the window. Ko had given his expensive car to Major Bao. It made no sense.
"An investigator is supposed to find answers, supposed to make life easier for people," she continued, as if she had not heard any of his words.
Shan focused on the end of her cigarette. "Sometimes an investigator can do no more than remind people of their conscience."
Xu's lips curled, as if she found the comment amusing. "Your killer," she observed. "He may have been looking for that one particular boy. Kublai. Maybe it's over."
"Or maybe he wants them all dead," Shan said.
Xu winced. "Don't be ridiculous. No one could get away with eliminating entire…" Her words drifted off, as her eyes drifted toward the horizon. She shook her head.
"What are you saying, Comrade Prosecutor? One or two boys, and who cares? But ten or fifteen, that would be what? Unacceptable casualty levels? Politically embarrassing? How about five or six? Maybe up to ten, and no one would really notice?" He kept his eyes on her as he spoke. "Just orphans, after all, just Kazakhs and Uighurs at that."
"Some people see conspiracies everywhere."
"This is the People's Republic, Prosecutor. Its lifeblood is conspiracy."
Her eyes flared, and she looked about at the other tables. No one seemed to be listening. "Be careful, comrade. I know my responsibilities to the state."
"Wonderful news," Shan snapped.
Her brow wrinkled in question.
"That you take your job seriously. The prosecution of crime, isn't that what it is?"
She frowned again and pulled on her cigarette.
"Maybe this investigator from Beijing," Shan said, "maybe he discovered the most important thing of all. That working for the government is not always the same as working for the people."
She surveyed the compound. Shan followed her gaze and saw another familiar face among the men at the mahjong table, despite the oversized Chinese army hat pulled low over his head. Fat Mao.
The horse cart pulled slowly away from the garage bay.
"I checked with all the Ministry offices from here to Kashgar and a hundred miles east. There have been no other reports of children being killed."
He stared at her. She did not blink, she did not look away. "Another boy was killed since the one brought to Yoktian," Shan announced. "The fourth boy."
"No." Xu glared at him resentfully. "I don't believe it."
"You said no once before, Comrade Prosecutor, when I told you boys were dying."
Xu frowned and said nothing.
"A boy named Khitai was killed near the giant prayer flag in the mountains. You know that flag."
"I know it," she replied stiffly.
Shan nodded. "You were seen there." A thought occurred to Shan. Batu had believed Xu had gone to find boys and kill them. But maybe she was following someone. She had left the camera for surveillance. He had thought it was to watch for Buddhists and dissidents. But maybe it was to watch for the killer.
Her eyes smoldered.
"Perhaps it means you are close to an arrest," Shan suggested, returning her angry gaze.
"A small group of herders had been seen there three days ago. We went to investigate. They may have been with one of Lau's zheli. Or perhaps they needed to be registered for the Poverty Scheme."
