The Lord of Death is-6

by Eliot Pattison

  Kypo considered the terrain a moment. “These rocks get rearranged all the time,” he said, as if the mountain itself had willed their release. “It wouldn’t take much persuasion.” He pointed to the slope above the road. “Undermine a few of the biggest boulders until they begin to roll, then brace them. Chip away the support of the column so that when it is hit by the boulders it snaps.”

  Shan realized the rope had not been used to pull the column down, but to stabilize the loose rocks above. “How would I know how far to chip into the base of the column?”

  Kypo shrugged. “Luck, I guess,” he said with an uneasy glance toward Shan. They both knew it had taken consummate skill with chisel and wedge to loosen the column just enough to be toppled by a rolling boulder at the right moment.

  “But the timing of the avalanche wasn’t just luck.”

  Kypo adjusted his glasses, his gaze shifting back and forth from the road to the slope. “If you knew how to work with ropes and harnesses, you could fashion a tether, like a cradle, and roll the stones into it, putting pressure on it so the stones would roll away when the tether was released.” He pointed to another large outcropping that shadowed the slope. “I would do it behind there, so no one in a vehicle coming up from the valley could see me. Stay in the shadow, release the ropes, and run away into the maze of rocks above.”

  “It might take only one person to trigger such a rockslide, but more than one to rig it.”

  Kypo shrugged again. “Two, four, ten, who cares? When the wind blows your house down, you don’t care about how many clouds were pushing it.”

  It was a particularly Tibetan perspective. Violence was like a storm, seizing both those committing it and their victims. It was a waste of time to try to explain, it was only necessary to burrow into a safe place and let it blow itself out.

  “How many people in the base camp knew about the bus?”

  “No one. It was a Public Security secret. Why?”

  “Because someone planned all this very carefully. Stole the ropes and rigged the avalanche in advance. The ropes were taken from the base camp days ago, and the camp is full of people who know how to rig ropes. How long do you think it will be before Public Security realizes that?”

  The words seemed to hit Kypo like a blow. His face darkened. He whipped the section of rope in his hand against a rock. His livelihood, and that of his entire village, depended on the base camp, and Public Security could easily shut it down if it suspected the camp was connected to the murders.

  Shan paced along the rocks that had tumbled down the slope to block the bus, now pushed to the side of the road. Halfway along the row he paused. At first he thought the faint pattern was a trick of the light. Then he knelt and studied the marks, seeing more, one on each of the large rocks. Someone had lightly chalked an ancient Tibetan mantra, an invocation of a protector demon, on the rocks facing the road. It had been done after the stones had been bulldozed to the shoulder. He stood and looked at the warning signs and bullet casings on the opposite side of the road. The opposing teams had squared off, facing each other.

  He watched Kypo climb back up the road and followed, finding him staring at the killing ground with a hollow expression as Jomo, leaning against the truck, nervously watched him.

  “There are people already leaving for the season,” Kypo stated, his gaze fixed on the outline of the bodies Shan had drawn in the soil. “Good porters, the seasoned ones who know the mountain, will be hard to find.”

  “Because the traditional ones respect the mountain deity,” Shan ventured.

  Kypo nodded. “Violence like this could anger the mountain for months. Every team last week had to turn back from the summit because of storms.”

  “There are always storms.”

  “Not like these. One of them had ice needles, like little knives. Two sherpas came back with bloody faces, their parkas ripped to shreds. She’s furious, more than anyone can remember,” Kypo declared, and walked around the truck to climb in.

  Shan knelt again, studying the contour of the ground. Where they had not dumped the fresh soil the knobs had raked the ground clean, but he perceived the bare suggestion of a disturbance, a subtle mound with cracks at the top, as if the mountain were pushing something out, rejecting something. He bent and with his fingers probed the loosened dirt, quickly extracting three dirty pieces of black plastic and metal. He experimented with the pieces a moment, fitting them this way and that, until he had constructed most of what had been a cell phone. Someone had smashed it before burying it. He gazed at it in confusion. The only wireless phones that worked in the region were the larger satellite phones. Such a phone would have been useless. Why would someone-the murderer? — think it so dangerous it had to be destroyed?

  He rose and showed the fragments to Jomo, holding them together so they were clearly recognizable. “What was this phone in its prior life?” he queried absently.

  Jomo’s expression became very serious. He took the pieces, turning them over in his palm, then looked up. “A prayer wheel,” he declared.

  The words filled Shan with a strange, unexpected sadness, and he spoke no more as they climbed back into the truck.

  The Himalayas were the great planetary train wreck. Here, at the high spine of the world Shan now gazed over, was where tectonic plates constantly crashed and ground, here the Eurasian plate was clawing its way over the Indian subcontinent. As he paced along a high knoll, waiting as Jomo scanned the slopes with binoculars, Shan watched a huge slab of ice and snow slough off the side of the nearest mountain, taking house-sized boulders with it. Here was a place where worlds were constantly changing, and Shan had a gnawing sense that he was caught up in one of the seismic shifts that would alter the region forever.

  After leaving Kypo at Rongphu gompa, the monastery nearest the base camp, Shan had directed Jomo to cruise slowly along the high mountain roads, pausing frequently to scan the slopes.

  “There!” Jomo now called, pointing to a white spot on the adjoining slope before handing Shan the glasses. He studied the familiar white land cruiser that was parked on a steep dirt track near a shepherd’s house, then motioned Jomo back into the truck. They reached the weather-beaten structure just as Constable Jin emerged around a corner.

  Looking as if he had bitten into something sour, the constable passed Shan and circled the truck once before speaking. “You can hear this old crate two miles away. You’re going to put the sheep off their grazing.”

  “It was the only one in Tsipon’s fleet he could spare.”

  “Bullshit,” Jin said, eyeing Jomo, who still sat inside, nervously gripping the wheel. “It’s his way of trying to bell his dog. He knows he can’t entirely trust you.”

  An adolescent boy, his face smeared with soot, peered around the corner of the house, wide-eyed, clearly fearful of Jin. The constable often let it be known that he carried enough authority to put any Tibetan away for a year, without a judge’s order, on what in China was called administrative detention.

  “Is Colonel Tan still in the town jail?” Shan asked.

  “He’s not going anywhere. That cell will be the last room he ever sees.”

  “I need to talk with him.”

  Jin’s raucous laugh shook a flight of sparrows from a nearby bush.

  Shan did not alter his steady gaze.

  Jin turned away, lighting a cigarette as he surveyed the slopes. “Those monks could be a hundred miles away by now. Religious Affairs thinks I can just knock on a few doors and they will run out, begging me to put manacles on them.”

  Shan glanced back at the shepherd boy, considering Jin’s words. A woman was pulling the boy backward now, tears staining the soot on her face. “Your assignment is for Religious Affairs? Not Cao? Not Public Security?”

  “The Bureau of Religious Affairs has jurisdiction over monks. After all the protests last year, the policy is for Public Security to keep a low profile with monks and lamas, especially in this area, so they loan men to the bureau and put them i
n neckties. And Religious Affairs is taking this personally. The fire, then the ambush. Someone betrayed them, someone shamed them.”

  “What fire?”

  “Two days before the murders, in town. The Religious Affairs office was nearly burned down. Officially they say it was an accident. But the unofficial version is different. They found something in the fire, a statue of an old protector god that didn’t belong there, sitting in the ashes, unharmed. Like the god had decided to take revenge after all these years.”

  Shan’s mind raced. Since the last season of protests in Tibet the government had grown unpredictable in reacting to anything that might hint of political unrest. More than ever, Public Security worked in the shadows. It would have worked especially hard to assure no one suspected an overt act against Religious Affairs. “What kind of deity?” he asked.

  Jin grimaced, as if Shan were trying to trap him. Displaying such knowledge in some circles would show dangerous reactionary leanings. “The mother protector, Tara. Not like at the killings.”

  Shan went very still. “There was a deity at the murder scene?”

  Jin frowned. He clearly had not intended to divulge so much. “On a high, flat rock a hundred feet away, found the next day, looking at the crime scene. The head of a bull, holding a rope and sword,” he explained.

  “You mean Yama the Lord of Death.”

  As if to change the subject, Jin reached into his pocket and produced a heavy steel carabiner, the snaplink model favored by climbers on the upper slopes. “They think I can find a trail of these that will lead me to the traitor.”

  “A trail of snaplinks?”

  “Someone handed these out to shepherds and farmers in the upper valleys, like favors or souvenirs. They must have been stolen, like those ropes that were used in the ambush.” As he spoke, the handheld radio in his vehicle crackled to life with a report that the town of old Tingri, forty miles away, had been searched with no sign of the fugitives. Jin muttered a curse, then reached in and shut off the radio. He hated being accountable to anyone else when he was outside the office.

  The woman appeared on the slope above the house, frantically running with the boy toward their pastures. “Did they have one of the snaplinks?”

  Jin shrugged. “You know these hill people. They won’t talk to anyone in a uniform. I said I’m coming back tomorrow to shoot ten sheep if they don’t tell me where I can find those monks.”

  “But you won’t.”

  The constable shrugged again. “I am fond of mutton.”

  “They’ll spend the day moving all their sheep. Come back tomorrow and you’ll find no trace of the sheep or the shepherds. And shepherds don’t go anywhere close to the base camp, there’s no grass that high up. You need to look in town or in the base camp itself.”

  “I don’t get paid to concoct theories. Someone’s coming from Lhasa for that. A real wheelsmasher. He’ll start with the other small gompas, assuming monks help each other.”

  Shan’s mouth went dry. A wheelsmasher was one of the senior zealots from the Bureau of Religious Affairs, notorious for crushing old prayer wheels under their boots. A wheelsmasher team had come through the month before, removing all public statues of Buddha. “I need to see Tan,” he said again, more urgently.

  “We used to have a captain from Shanghai who kept a pack of those big Tibetan mastiffs, the ones they say are incarnations of failed monks. He would cruise along the roads and shoot a stray one, then skin it and feed it to his pack. He could never stop laughing when he watched, telling everyone it was the story of modern Tibet. Dog eat dog. That’s what you are to those who are running the jail now. Fresh meat. It’s not the county’s jail anymore. It belongs to Public Security until this is over.”

  “They have to eat. They have to have their toilets cleaned.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning they still rely on your office to assure the dirty chores get done.”

  Jin’s silence was all the confirmation Shan needed. “Just get me in with the cleaning crew. Today. This evening.”

  Jin studied Shan with a new, appraising gaze. “If I don’t find those monks soon,” he offered in a tentative tone, “Religious Affairs will have me on my hands and knees looking under every pile of yak dung.”

  Shan clenched his jaw, gazed for a long moment at the snowy peak above them. “I will share what I learn about the ambush. You share what you know about the killings. But I will not help you find the monks.”

  “Not good enough. This is my one chance at a victory big enough to get me out of this damned county.” The week before, Jin had stopped Shan on the road and asked him to look over his application for a transfer to one of the cities in the east. More than once he had dreamily spoken of living in Hong Kong, or even Bangkok.

  “I can help with your relocation,” Shan stated flatly. “I can do it today.”

  Jin’s face tightened. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’ve been to the desert in Xinjiang,” Shan observed, referring to the vast province north of Tibet, a favorite dumping ground for disfavored government workers. “The sand is always blowing. It gets in your nostrils, in your mouth, in your clothes, in your rice. In the summer it can be hot enough to boil tea. Once I saw a man’s eyeballs roll up into his head and he dropped dead from the heat. In the winter people who stop to sleep in their cars are usually found frozen to death. After a month there you will think this is paradise.”

  Jin fidgeted with the pistol on his belt.

  “I will go back to town now,” Shan said. “I will find Major Cao and give him a signed witness statement that you were near the crime scene, right there when those monks escaped.”

  Shan watched for a reaction, confident in his assessment of Jin.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You heard the guns and you went to investigate. But as soon as you saw all the knobs, you fled. An armed officer on a horse could have rounded up those monks, and maybe the murderer as well. Religious Affairs and Public Security will fight over the right to interrogate and then punish you. Every other law enforcement officer known to have been there has already been shipped to the desert, or worse. How long before you’re breathing sand into your lungs? A week? Three days? I don’t think they even gave the others time to pack.”

  “Cao will eat you alive if he finds you with his prisoner.”

  “Me? Men like Cao have tried more than once.” Shan studied Jin’s anxious face, then shrugged and turned back to Jomo, waiting in the truck. “Don’t forget the sunscreen,” he called out. “You’ll need barrels of the stuff where you’re going.”

  An hour later Jomo eased the truck to a stop by the curb in the center of Shogo town, shaking Shan from the slumber that had overtaken him on the long descent from the high ranges.

  “Wait five minutes,” the Tibetan instructed as he climbed out. “Then I’ll take you back to the stable.”

  Shan watched the mechanic uneasily as he disappeared behind the door of the familiar two-story building, then climbed out to stretch his legs, pacing past the signs that advertised Tsingtao beer and karaoke, stepping to the corner where he could see the squat gray complex that housed the jail. In his mind’s eye, before turning back and entering the tavern, he constructed where Tan’s cell would be.

  Gyalo’s inn was the most popular place in town after working hours, filled not only with townspeople but also the truck drivers who used Shogo as an overnight rest stop on the route to Nepal. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the dimly lit room, laced with the smell of unwashed bodies and the raw onions that patrons chewed on like apples between swigs of pungent sorghum whiskey.

  The customers hooted and whistled as a wiry old man in a red robe danced along the top of the bar, waving the robe provocatively. Jomo had come to see his father but he just stood in the shadows, staring in shame at the floor. Drunken customers were tossing coins at his father. The robe he wore, covered with bumper stickers, souvenir button pins and sewn patches meant
for army uniforms, was intended for a Buddhist monk. Jomo’s father, the town jester and keeper of the tavern, had been a member of Shogo’s monastery before it was leveled decades earlier.

  Shan followed Jomo into the shadows, though a moment too late.

  “Demons!” Gyalo cried jubilantly as he pointed at them, his voice slurred from drink. “Fresh demons have arrived!” With astonishing speed he picked up an empty beer bottle and threw it at Shan. It would have hit him squarely in the head had he not sidestepped. The crowd went wild, raucously cheering at the new show.

  “We should go,” Jomo muttered, not lifting his gaze from the floor. He looked as if he were about to weep. “I’ll come back when he’s sober.”

  As they began to move toward the door, Gyalo pranced across two tables to alight on a heavy wooden chair mounted on an ornate altar salvaged from a temple destroyed years earlier. On the back of the chair a T-shirt was stretched, with the image of a woman making love to a skeleton dressed as a pirate. On the wall to the left, an image of Buddha as a rock star had been painted, on the right was another Buddha on a motorcycle, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Beneath it was a large bronze deity in the meditation position, an antiquity, its hands pocked where cigarettes had been extinguished, its lap now an ashtray.

  Hands reached out and grabbed Shan and Jomo, pulling them toward the altar. Shan struggled at first, knowing what was to happen, but it was futile to resist. He let himself be manhandled into a standing position next to Jomo, beneath Gyalo.

  “Gulag prisoner!” Gyalo shouted, lifting his cup to salute Shan. “We worship at your feet!” He drank, then lowered his voice to a stage whisper, addressing the crowd. “He never speaks of what crime he committed to be condemned to Tibet. Mass murder maybe? Drug lord? Raped the Chairman’s sister?” Shan did not resist as the old Tibetan, not for the first time, lifted Shan’s arm and rolled down his sleeve to display Shan’s tattoo for all to see. “Marked by the gods!” he cried, and poured the remaining contents of his cup over the tattoo as if to anoint it.