Shan felt a rush of joy at the unexpected news. “Do you know where?” He had a sudden vision of himself carrying a bundle of the plates to the gompa, could almost see the joy of the old lamas when they saw what he had brought them.
Kypo shrugged. “In the mountains. We have to go. Tsipon said the moment you could stand I was to bring you.” Tsipon’s lead manager for expedition support was always a man of few words.
Shan rose from his stool. “Thank you, Kypo, for my-” he gestured to the stall that had been concealed with blankets-“my hospital room.”
“Tsipon said to put you in one of the storerooms in the warehouse, or that cottage behind the warehouse. I said you would want to be here, with your-” Kypo glanced at the workbench- “things.”
Shan had not hidden his work on the blocks from Kypo, but the Tibetan never once had asked about them, or seemed remotely interested. “He said make sure you were somewhere dark and warm.”
“You brought the food and things?”
“I brought the food and bandages,” Kypo replied pointedly, and stepped into the sunlight.
Minutes later Shan walked through the open garage door at the side of the largest building in town, emblazoned with a sign for the Himalayan Supply Company. Workers were carrying boxes, loading trucks bound for the Chomolungma base camp. Tsipon, standing with a clipboard in the entry to a storeroom lined with shelves, gestured Shan through the door. Shan found himself glancing around the room, where he had conducted inventory a week earlier. The shelves then had been overflowing with cartons containing oxygen cylinders, flashlight batteries, pitons, harnesses, heavy ropes coiled over long pegs. Now half the supplies were gone.
Tsipon tossed Shan an apple. “If you cost me this contract, Shan, you and I are done,” he growled. “And if I say goodbye, it’s not just goodbye to your son, it’s goodbye to the Himalayas.” Everything in Tsipon’s life was a negotiation. He had to be sure Shan knew that without his protection Shan would be picked up and detained for having no residency papers.
“You should have wakened me,” Shan said. “I should have been in the mountains already.”
Tsipon shook his head. “There were troops all over the mountains searching for those damned escaped monks. If some officer in the mountain commandos found you, without registration papers, how long do you think you’d last? And the shape you were in, you probably would have crawled off to some cave and died just to spite me.”
Shan took a bite of the apple. “Who else came to the stable?” he asked. He knew Tsipon, one of the most worldly Tibetans he had ever known, was not capable of making the little altar or writing the mantra.
Tsipon ignored the question. He stepped to the shelves, reached into a carton and tossed out clothing, kicking it toward Shan. “I’ve promised the American a dozen experienced porters next week. I went to Tumkot village yesterday,” he said, referring to the mountain village that supplied most of the porters and guides used by the foreign climbing parties. “I offered double wages. They practically threw me out. Their damned fortuneteller has them all worked up, telling them the signs say the mountain must be appeased, that the mountain had claimed Tenzin first and needed him back. They demand the body. I promised them you would get it for them.”
“When?”
Tsipon stuck his head out the door long enough to chide a Tibetan woman who had dropped a box of fuel canisters. “We have maybe three days, no more,” he snapped, and gestured Shan out the door into the cavernous main chamber of the warehouse. After locking the storeroom behind him, Tsipon lowered himself onto a crate and lit a cigarette.
“Have the foreigners arrived yet?”
“You met that Yates.”
“I mean officials. From some embassy, over the other dead woman.”
Tsipon cast a puzzled glance at him, blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “They must have hit your head pretty hard. There was no dead foreigner.”
The announcement silenced Shan for a moment. He closed his eyes, again fighting his confused swirl of memories from the day of the murders. “What was the bargain you struck with Major Cao?” he asked at last.
The Tibetan blew two streams of smoke from his nostrils. “Bargain?”
“What was your accommodation with Public Security?” Shan pressed. “If I wasn’t his prime suspect, I was the closest thing he had to a witness. He would have at least held me for having no papers.”
“For this kind of case he needs to paint a very complete picture. He seems to want nothing more to do with you, though he knows you were on the fringe of the scene he is painting. I am to watch you and report back to him,” Tsipon admitted. “He might try to have you followed, though once in the mountains that should not be a problem for one of your capabilities.”
“Why would he still think I am involved?”
“Because of the paper in your pocket with the telephone number of our new hotel, where the minister stayed.”
Shan lowered himself onto one of the crates. Cao had never asked about the paper, but of course he would not have forgotten it.
“I can go to Lhasa,” Tsipon added in a speculative tone, “and come back with a bus full of workers. More Tibetans are being put out of work every day. That new train to Lhasa brings a hundred Chinese immigrants a day, each one poised to take a Tibetan’s job.” Tsipon fixed Shan with a meaningful stare.
It was a threat. Tsipon would prefer to use seasoned mountain tribesmen but he could always sweep up two dozen desperate Tibetans in one of the cities who would leap at the chance of earning wages. Such men would be hopelessly unprepared for dealing with the dangers of the upper slopes. Some, perhaps a fourth or more, would die. It wasn’t simply that Tsipon would blame him, but that he would also send Shan to retrieve the bodies.
“Why did you have that paper with the hotel number?” Tsipon demanded, anger abruptly entering his voice.
“There’s a chance,” Shan said, not sure why his voice had grown hoarse, “that I can get my son out of the yeti factory, get him back to the prison in Lhadrung County where he came from, with lamas and monks, where he will stand a chance of surviving. He’s going to die if he stays where he is.”
“That doesn’t explain the paper.”
“Someone I know from Lhadrung is staying there for the conference- the colonel who administers Lhadrung county, who is responsible for the prison camp where Ko came from.”
An odd expression appeared on Tsipon’s face, a mixture of confusion and glee. “His name?”
“Tan. Colonel Tan. He’s the only real chance I have for saving my son.”
The laugh that erupted from Tsipon’s throat grew so deep he had to hold his belly.
“I don’t understand.”
“Tan is the one. He’s not in the hotel, he’s in Cao’s jail. Colonel Tan is the one who murdered Minister Wu.”
Chapter Three
They sailed in a smoking junk over the mountains. Jomo, the mechanic who accompanied Shan from Tsipon’s compound, believed in the reincarnation of machines. The ancient, sputtering Jiefang cargo truck he was now teaching Shan to drive had, the wiry Tibetan insisted, centuries earlier been a junk in the emperor’s battle fleet. Half its forward gears were missing, its rear window was gone, and its seat had so many gaps in the vinyl they had to sit on burlap sacks. Shan did not ask what kind of wretched life the ship had led to justify such a rebirth.
On the opposite side of Shan, Kypo gazed out the window with a dour expression. Tsipon had sent Jomo to show Shan how to drive the battered blue truck, but Kypo, Shan suspected, was there to watch over Shan.
“Soldiers like ants crawling over the rocks,” Jomo explained when Shan asked about the day of the killing. “More soldiers than anyone has seen in years. Border commandos, knobs, military police. Everyone ran into holes, some so deep they probably are still buried.”
“There were monks,” Shan reminded him, “from a monastery in one of the side valleys.”
Jomo was silent so long Shan did not think he had heard. “
It was like old times,” the Tibetan said in a tight voice. “Hunting red robes like they were wild game. The soldiers were angry, they had rifles with scopes like they use when they see people in the high border passes. One monk was brought back dead.”
Shan found he could not speak for a long time. “Did any. . did they find all the others?” he finally asked.
“Who knows? The government won’t even officially say they raided the gompa in the first place. Once,” Jomo added after a moment, with a gesture to the high peaks, “there were hermits living in hidden caves above here.”
The decrepit truck groaned and shuddered as Shan took over the wheel to climb the next slope, the gears slipping, the engine backfiring with each shift. He began to think of it not so much as a truck as a conveyance to some peculiar new form of hell. He couldn’t save his son without saving Colonel Tan, a man he reviled, a man who had overseen Shan’s prison camp, where so many old lamas had died.
The crime scene had been reincarnated as a dump site. Tire tracks and boot prints crisscrossed the clearing. Cigarette butts were scattered everywhere. Empty water bottles had been tossed on the side of the road. Candy wrappers and crumpled cigarette packs had been trapped by the wind under stones. There was no trace of where the bodies, the blood, or the car had been.
Shan crouched at the edge of the clearing, trying to recall the terrible few minutes he had spent here, his gaze settling on the two rocks where the women had been leaning. He rose, then knelt by the rocks, sifting the oddly sandy soil in his fingers before surveying the murder scene in his mind again. There had been blood near the car, and shallow ruts scraped in the soil ending at their heels. The women had been dragged from beside the car and propped up. Before fleeing the killer had arranged them against the rocks, as if to make them comfortable. The Western woman had gazed at Everest with longing as she died.
“You’re supposed to be getting Tenzin’s body back,” Kypo declared from over his shoulder. “I could have told you it wasn’t here.”
Shan turned to meet the Tibetan’s challenging stare.
“In the village people won’t talk with me,” Kypo said. “They blame me, because I helped persuade them that you should be the corpse carrier. It was a sacred trust, they say, and you broke it.”
The words hit Shan hard. It was true. He had failed the sturdy, honest people of Tumkot village, had failed Tenzin himself. Of all the mysteries before him, the one he would have no time to address was why the old astrologer of the village had, after the first fatality of the season, abruptly declared that Shan was to be the carrier of corpses that year.
“If Tenzin cannot be found,” Shan ventured, “it must mean the villagers tried to search for him after I was arrested.”
“Up the trail, down the trail, along every side trail for a radius of two miles or more.”
“Not the road.”
“Not the road,” Kypo confirmed. The trails belonged to the Tibetans, the road to the government. “After a few hours there were too many uniforms on the mountain to continue.”
“The body was lost during the confusion here,” Shan explained in a patient tone. “Because of what happened here.”
The lean, athletic Tibetan, something of a local hero for having twice ascended Chomolungma, winced. “They raked it,” he announced. The sullen expression behind his sunglasses had not changed.
“Raked it?”
“It’s the road the tourists come up. All that blood was bad for business. They brought in a load of dirt and raked it.” Kypo turned and paced once around the small clearing, then wandered around the high outcropping that concealed it from the road below.
Shan stared in disbelief at the fresh soil at his feet. Once an investigation had been turned into a melodrama scripted for the Party, nothing could be relied upon. Even here, all he could do was grab at shadows. The knobs had buried the crime scene.
He shook his head then stepped to the rocks where he had found the women and with his heel dug two outlines, the shapes of the bodies as he had seen them. When he looked up the mechanic was standing in the middle of the raked dirt, gazing fearfully at the outlines. It was as if Shan had brought back the dead.
“Who did it, Jomo?” he asked. “Who was the killer?”
The Tibetan cast a longing glance toward the truck, as if thinking of bolting. “I never thought it was you,” he offered.
For a moment Shan considered the mechanic, who was such a wizard at coaxing life back into old engines that he was in demand at every garage in town. “What does your father say?” he asked, seeing the expected wince. Jomo’s father, the tavern keeper who was more often drunk than not, often professed publicly that he hated his son, had even named his son the Tibetan word for princess. But Jomo, well into his forties, had kept the name, and dutifully cared for his father, the town jester, often conveying him home at night in a wheelbarrow.
Jomo looked up apologetically. His father, Gyalo, occupied the rundown house closest to Shan’s stable, and more than once had entertained himself by throwing empty beer bottles at Shan’s door. “Some men in the tavern said they should drag you out of the jail and give you what you deserve, because killing the minister was going to ruin the season for everyone. My father said we pay taxes so Public Security could have bullets, and he wanted his money’s worth.” Jomo shrugged and looked away. “He was drunk.” Several times Shan had found Jomo in the dawn outside his door, sweeping up shards of glass. Suddenly Shan realized that if it had not been Tsipon or Kypo who had made the little altar by his pallet there was only one other possibility.
“I didn’t thank you, Jomo, for the prayers when I was injured, for summoning the Medicine Buddha.”
The mechanic glanced up nervously, not at Shan but toward the road, as if worried Kypo might have heard. “There aren’t any good doctors in town,” he muttered.
“What do they say in the market about the killing?” Shan asked. In such a place, in such a case, Public Security would have operatives, disguised as merchants or even truck drivers, not just to pay for secrets but to plant rumors.
“Someone from away. A private grudge. The minister was a great hero in Beijing. Someone said she was fighting corruption back in the capital and paid with her life when she was about to expose it.”
Not particularly original, Shan thought, but effective enough for one of the morality tales that always accompanied assassinations.
“It’s not the killing most talk about,” Jomo added in a conspiratorial tone. “It’s the monks in hiding, who refused to kowtow to Beijing. People who haven’t flown them for years are stringing up new prayer flags.” He stopped, grimacing as if frightened of his own words, then turned back to the truck and busied himself examining the tires.
Shan planted himself on a low rock where he could study the outlines of the bodies and the terrain. He had come from below that day, from the wrecked bus beyond the rise in the road, around the large outcropping that had obscured the car. The killer had done his work after the bus had been stopped, out of sight of the knob guards below. Out of sight, yet close enough for the pistol discharges to be masked by the firing of the knobs’ own guns. Monks had been wounded and beaten; one had later been killed. The thought chilled Shan to the bone. If the killings had been timed to coincide with the ambush on the bus, it meant the killer had used the monks, had played with their lives to accomplish his own crime. But the ambush below seemed to have been planned so the monks could get away, not merely as a diversion. It did not seem possible that a person who would take such risks to free monks would also fire bullets into two defenseless women.
He paced along the clearing, spotting Kypo leaning against a boulder at the side of the road, cleaning his sunglasses, staring at Jomo, his face drawn tight. One of the mysteries of Tsipon’s company was why these two men, Tsipon’s two trusted deputies, did not like each other, barely spoke to each other, seemed to go out of their way to avoid each other. Certainly the two men could not be more different in personality-Jomo t
he nervous, efficient mechanic always flitting about the garage and warehouse, Kypo the silent, contemplative climber and guide, always hiding behind sunglasses who, Tsipon insisted, knew the upper slopes of the Himalayas better than any man in China. But there was something else, Shan sensed, a wedge between them that neither seemed interested in removing.
As Kypo turned and moved down the road, Shan followed, pausing to study the scattered shell casings from knob rifles and the four large DANGER! NO STOPPING! signs that had been leaned against rocks at the eastern side of the road. Public Security might have balked at putting up crime scene tape, for fear of its effects on tourists, but had still made it clear the site was off limits. He halted at the stump of rock where the column had broken away to block the bus, seeing now the chisel marks along the side opposite the roadway. He lay on a small ledge behind the stump, exploring the shadow at its base with an outstretched hand, pulling up first one heavy wooden wedge, then two more before scrambling up the rock debris to lift the end of a red rope trapped under large boulders. It was as thick as his thumb, the heavy nylon rope brought in by Westerners for their expeditions. Kernmantle, they called it in English, the term for braided nylon filaments encased in an outer woven shell. This one had been ruined, crushed by boulders.
He tried in vain to recreate in his mind the pattern of ropes he had seen that day on the rocks, then spotted another remnant of red rope still wrapped around the broken column of rock that had stopped the bus, now pushed along the edge of the road. The rope had been used to ease the column forward as the wedges were inserted. But it made no sense. The strength of several men would have been required to topple the rock, but they would have been conspicuous to anyone coming up the road.
Kypo sat at the edge of the road examining a section of the red rope that he had cut away from the debris. It was, they both knew, some of the rope included in the inventory they had done a week earlier.
“How do I set up an avalanche to trigger when a bus passes?” he asked the Tibetan.
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