Cao glared at Shan then spun about and disappeared into the shadows. Shan did not look, just listened as the door opened and shut, twice. Guards appeared, unlocking his chains, escorting him to an interrogation room in another hallway off the cell corridor, chaining him to another metal chair. Moments later three men appeared, all wearing white laboratory coats, the oldest one carrying a doctor’s bag. He extracted his instruments slowly, fastidiously laying them in a line on the table. A small stainless-steel hammer. Four dental probes of various sizes. Two pairs of pliers. Several long, very thin, stainless steel needles. Short lengths of latex hose. A tooth extractor.
As they stood staring at him in the odd silent prelude with which such sessions always commenced, Shan grabbed one of the oversized needles. The three men stiffened, stepping back as Shan wielded it like a knife, leaning forward in his chair, swinging the treacherous-looking needle toward them until the chain on his wrist tightened and halted the movement. “Not to disappoint you,” he declared, “but I am no virgin.” With a single swift motion he buried the needle halfway into the bicep of his left arm.
One of the technicians gasped and threw his hand to his mouth as if about to lose the contents of his stomach; the other’s face drained of color. The doctor smiled.
Shan doubted that in all the history of the world anyone had organized the administration of misery and fear as efficiently as Beijing’s Public Security Bureau. The knobs had manuals, charts, entire six month training programs on what they termed physical interrogation. Like all mature sciences, it had its own jargon. Shan, in the hands of a master, had been given what the knobs called a ranging exam, a quick application of each of the primary tools, to gauge which he seemed to be most responsive to. As he had learned from the lamas with whom he had been imprisoned, he had gone to another place, had removed himself from his self. Let it be a storm that rages outside, a lama had once told him, over which you have no control. Stay on the inside, where the storm cannot reach.
He lay on the cell floor where they had thrown him afterward, unaware of anything except the pain that rose and ebbed, gradually becoming curious about the strange white pebble clutched in one hand, until he finally remembered. The knobs, becoming frustrated when he had responded only with silence, had rushed the rest of the session, knowing they would need Cao with them before they began in earnest, reacting only with disgust when, as they had lifted him from the chair, he had vomited onto the table, sending them reeling backward so that they did not notice him palm the tooth they had extracted.
He spat out blood then, steadying his shaking hand, stuffed the tooth back into the socket with a hard shove to seat it. His years in prison had taught him that a tooth so recently removed had a good chance of reattaching to the jaw. Stretching the fingers of his left hand, he rubbed the place where he had punctured his arm. The knobs had not recognized the trick taught to him by an old prisoner years earlier. If you were careful, and lucky enough, you would not only put your interrogators off their pace, you could also achieve a crude acupuncture, blocking the nerves from the left hand, a favorite target of interrogators, who preferred to keep the right one intact for penning confessions.
He crawled to the pallet by the back wall and collapsed on it, losing consciousness. When he awoke again night had fallen. He struggled into the meditation position and stared into the dark. Bits of his life outside again mingled with nightmarish visions. The serene faces of the two old Tibetans he loved like family, whom, for their own safety, he had left months earlier in the mountains east of Lhasa. The screams of other prisoners coming from behind closed interrogation room doors. Again and again, he ventured toward a chamber in his mind whose door had come ajar during his interrogation, not daring to look inside for fear of what he might see. But then a new storm of pain erupted, the door swung open and he could not stop the nightmare, seeing in his mind’s eye his son Ko, gulag prisoner Shan Ko, lying in his bed at the yeti factory, being tortured by the same team that had worked on Shan.
In the morning a slip of paper lay on the stool beside his pallet. It was a notification on a printed form. Unless directed otherwise by a signed statement, witnessed by a magistrate, a prisoner’s organs would be harvested for medical purposes immediately after execution. Not a prisoner, he saw, the prisoner. The form was made out in his name.
He did not acknowledge the team when they arrived, he just stared at the symbolic circle, the mandala he had drawn on the wall with his blood. The day before he had had the strength to make a show of resistance. Today it was all he could do not to cry out in pain as they pulled him to his feet. He tried to withdraw, to remove himself from the prisoner who shuffled down the corridor, raging at the voice inside that kept recounting to him the dozen ways a clever prisoner could bring about his own death during interrogation. His body reacted involuntarily, wretching in dry, shuddering heaves as the doctor opened his bag.
He fell into a strange torpor, unaware of the activity around him, roused only by a new, shooting pain in his right arm. His gaze followed the needle in his vein toward the hose that led to an intravenous feed. A technician was injecting something into a valve in the tube. With effort he focused on the bottle of clear liquid the man left on the table. He would know in a moment, from the taste in his mouth, whether it was one of the knobs’ truth serums or one of the solutions designed to set the muscles on fire. He gazed at the bottle numbly, not comprehending at first as a soothing warmth oozed through his limbs. Then abruptly he was fully awake, searching the resentful faces of the team for an explanation. They were giving him a painkiller and a bottle of glucose. They were silently bandaging his wounds.
Ten minutes later the team was gone, the glucose tube still in his arm, nothing left on the table but a steaming mug of tea. Shan had barely taken his first sip when Cao materialized out of the shadows.
“I understand there are hundreds of miles of wilderness above here,” the major observed in a sour voice.
Shan’s answer came out in a hoarse croak. “Thousands.”
“Good. Get lost in them.” There was a cold vehemence in the major’s words. “If I ever see you again I will find a meat cleaver and a plane, and I will drop pieces of you over the mountains as you watch.”
Shan silently sipped his tea, calculating the ways Cao could be setting a trap for him, then recalled the gap of hours when the team should have been working on him. “You found the pistol,” he concluded.
Cao answered by stepping to his side, jerking the glucose needle from his arm and pointing to the door.
Shan stood blinking in the briliant morning sun as the door slammed shut behind him. Shogo town was still waking up. A small flock of sheep wandered along the cracked pavement of the street. A group of shiny sport utility vehicles sped by filled with tourists bound for the Himalayas after a side trip to see the center of commerce at the top of the world. Somewhere someone burned incense, an offering to the gods for the new day. He had taken two stumbling steps before he noticed the well-dressed Tibetan sitting at a table outside the tea shop across the street. He paused as two army trucks, packed with border commandos, sped past in a cloud of dust. Then he limped across the road.
Tsipon, the leading businessman in Shogo, preeminent local member of the Party, was the only man in the town who ever wore a tie. In his suit and white shirt he looked as if he were attending a business meeting.
“I am grateful that you tried to get me transferred to the hospital,” Shan offered as he dropped into the chair beside him.
“It’s the climbing season, damn it. I can’t afford to lose another worker. The fool knobs don’t have a clue about economics.”
Another man appeared, holding three mugs of black tea, which he placed on the table, sliding one toward Shan, before settling into a third chair. He was tall and athletic looking, his skin bearing the weathered patina of one who spent long days in the high altitudes. With his black hair Shan might have taken him for a Tibetan waiter at first glance. Except that his features were W
estern and his clothes and boots would have cost a year’s income for the average Tibetan.
“Look at him,” the man groused in English to Tsipon. “He’s in no shape. The deal’s off.”
Shan glanced back at Tsipon, who stared at him expectantly. Apparently they were at a business meeting after all.
Tsipon offered a sly smile, then motioned to a woman standing inside the open door. She leaned over him, listening as he whispered, then hurried away.
“What day is it?” Shan asked in Tibetan.
“I’m sorry. It’s Saturday.”
Shan shut his eyes. For a moment he lost his grip on his pain, every synapse seeming to scream in agony.
“The region leading to the climbing trails on the Nepal side of the mountains has been sealed off by the Nepali military,” Tsipon said, switching to English. “Problems with the rebels who want to take over Katmandu. No Westerners are allowed to climb the south slope this season. Mr. Yates here has three groups of climbers already signed on for the season, expecting to be taken to the summit in the next six weeks. He needs to put them up the north face instead.”
As the stranger drank his tea, Shan saw the discolored flesh on two of his fingers, one of them missing its top joint, the mark of frostbite at high altitudes.
“Impossible,” Shan said. “You know it is impossible.” Putting an expedition on the slopes meant weeks of planning, permits, surveying advance campsites, staging supplies.
The stranger pushed a small stack of napkins toward Shan, motioning to a wet spot of crimson on the table. Blood was dripping from the bandage on Shan’s temple.
“Damn it Shan,” Tsipon snapped, switching to Tibetan, “this American is fat with cash. His company has three expeditions already paid for. Do you have any idea how much money that means? He is going to charge them another twenty percent for coming to China, which I’m to get a quarter of.”
As Shan pressed a napkin to his head the woman reappeared, setting a plate of steaming momo, Tibetan dumplings, in front of him. His free hand seemed to act of its own accord, darting out, stuffing one into his mouth.
“I need sherpas,” Tsipon said, “mountain porters, mules, and horses. New camps have to be laid out, supplies staged, new safety lines rigged.”
Shan glanced back and forth from one man to the other. “Just go up to the villages,” he said as he gulped down another momo. “Enough cash can work miracles.” He was suddenly ravenous, and recalled he had eaten only a few mouthfuls of cold rice during the past three days.
“Not this time,” Tsipon explained. “There is a complication. The sherpas blame me. I blame you.”
Shan glanced at the American, who sipped at his tea with a confused, self-conscious expression, obviously not understanding their Tibetan words but not missing the tension between the two. “For what?”
“That sherpa you were carrying. Tenzin. He was well liked, came from a big family living on both sides of the border, famous for having reached the summit as a teenager years ago. They want his body.”
The momo in Shan’s hand stopped in midair. “Surely someone found the mule. It wouldn’t wander far.”
“No. Nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me spell it out,” Tsipon said, still in Tibetan. “This fool American and his partner are offering the best opportunity I’ve ever had, the best this town has ever had. You agreed to work for me because I could get you into the yeti factory to see that worthless son of yours.”
Shan’s head snapped up, strangely fearful over the mention of his son, even more alarmed that someone might overhear and guess the secret that had brought him to the region. A wild hope had nurtured him through the dreadful hours in the jail and many dark nights before, a dream, a fantasy, that somehow he would not only reach his son in the knobs’ secret hospital, but discover some means to get him out, at least back to the gulag camps in Lhadrung where Shan and his friends could help him.
“I agreed to hire you because of your magic at fixing problems with those old-fashioned ones, up in the mountains.”
Shan stared at his momo, shaking his head from side to side. “You were supposed to get me in. I’ve waited two months.”
“That was Thursday, when you were going to join me on an official Party delegation to inspect the place. You missed your date.”
The desolation that gripped Shan was so overpowering he had to brace himself with a hand on the table. “Then when’s the next one?” he asked in a hollow voice.
“Find me that dead sherpa,” Tsipon said in a matter-of-fact voice, “or forget about seeing your son.”
Shan stared at Tsipon in disbelief. He hadn’t been released from captivity. Tsipon and the knobs had just found a new form of torture.
He gradually became aware that more napkins were being pushed toward him by Yates. Blood was dripping onto his dumplings. He pushed away his plate, nauseated, and with great effort rose. He swayed, took a single faltering step, and collapsed to the ground unconscious.
He was not aware of being moved, only of the pain coursing through his body then, later, of dim lights in the blackness, and more nightmares. The pain rose in tides, ebbing and surging, making it impossible to focus, to try to make sense of the events that had occurred since he’d left Tenzin’s body on the mountain. Faces from his past in Beijing mocked him. Visions of Ko being tortured intensified, mingled with questioning, lifeless faces: of the blond woman on the mountain asking why she had to die, of Tenzin asking why Shan had abandoned him in the hour he needed him the most. When Shan woke, in the blackness, a single thought sustained him. Tsipon did not understand. Shan had another way to reach his son. He simply had to reach the new hotel at the base of the mountain, and he could leave Tsipon and Cao and the murders behind. Before he passed out again he heard himself call out for Ko, pleading with him to survive, to endure the tortures of the clinic.
At last there was only the goddess. Floating in the darkness, she gazed at him with strained tolerance, reproach in her eyes, reminding him there were fugitive monks in the mountains, frightened monks who needed his help.
Each time he woke he became more aware of his surroundings. Tea and noodles appeared beside his pallet, and when he consumed them they were magically replenished, waiting for him beside a flickering candle each time he regained consciousness. Then, finally, suddenly, he was awake, able to sit up.
He discovered that his dark chamber had been made by hanging heavy black felt blankets around his pallet, supported by climbing ropes. At each side of his makeshift closet sat an upturned wooden crate. On another upturned crate to his left was a stack of gauze topped by a roll of medical tape and an envelope of antibiotic powder. To his right was a small figurine of the Tibetan protec-tress deity Tara. Flanking the Tara were two brown smoldering sticks stuck in a plank, a familiar mantra scrawled on a scrap of paper between them. He recognized the odor of aloe. Someone had been tending him with bandages and pills. Someone else had been treating him with healing incense and an invocation of the Medicine Buddha.
Shan slowly rose, stretching, rubbing the stiffness out of his limbs. Then he probed the blankets until he found an opening, and staggered out into a familiar maze of stone and old beams. The stable that he had adopted two months before as his living quarters, abandoned decades earlier, was at the mouth of the wide gully that served as the dump for Shogo town. Though it was shunned by the townspeople, though Tsipon had offered him quarters in the rear of his warehouse, Shan had been drawn to the place. It was old and decaying, but as he aged he found himself more and more comfortable with the old and decaying, particularly the old and decaying of Tibet. He had seen the heavy hand-hewn posts and beams rising out of the rubble, as solid as they had been when erected centuries earlier. He had also seen under the rear piles of rubble something else that had been the real reason he had set up his meager household there. He hobbled to the makeshift workbench, threw off the dusty canvas that covered it, and confirmed that nothing had been touc
hed. Spread over the planks were a score of ancient carved printing blocks, used for printing peche, the traditional Tibetan books of prayer. His spare hours at the stable were spent restoring the long rectangular blocks retrieved from the rubble, fitting and gluing together pieces that had been split apart, scraping away the dirt and dried manure that filled the carved characters and ritual images. He lifted the block he had last worked on and without conscious effort began scraping away its grime.
It had become a nightly ritual, the thing that brought him so close to his old friends Gendun and Lokesh that he sometimes sensed them at his side, a better restorative than any salve or pill.
Shan finished the rosewood peche plate, a page of the heart sutra with images of birds carved along the borders, and put it in a sack he kept in the shadows; he would take the best of the peche boards back to Lhadrung, so they would be safe with his friends in their secret hermitage. He had begun another block, clearing it with a brush he had made with hairs from the old mule’s mane, when a thought began to nag him, growing until he set the brush down and stared into the shadows. Not once had anyone mentioned the dead Westerner. The murder of a state minister might be big news in Beijing but the murder of a Westerner in the shadow of Everest would draw global headlines.
The open, pleading face of the blond woman who had died in his arms kept leaping into his consciousness, the foreigner who, impossibly, had been traveling alone with the minister. Is it me?
she had asked, as if she had been uncertain who was dying.
“They say there is still a gompa in the mountains that uses these things,” an uneasy voice suddenly declared behind him.
Shan spun about to see a tall Tibetan in sunglasses silhouetted in the doorway, looking at the peche plates.
“With a printing press I mean, the last in the region.”
The Lord of Death is-6 Page 3