Jomo spat a curse at his father, grabbed Shan’s arm, and pulled him from Gyalo’s reach. His father sneered at Jomo, then broke into loud, howling, wheezing laughter that quickly spread through the room. “Pum phat!” Gyalo shouted at their backs. They were old words, used as an emphasis at the end of certain prayers.
“Why do you let him do that?” Jomo demanded as they stepped outside.
“He’s just trying to sell more drinks.”
“He’s trying to get rid of you. He knows that the more people who know you are a convict the less safe you are.”
Shan studied Jomo’s face, which had become tormented at Gyalo’s mention of rape. His father had been a young lama, had taken his vows of celibacy, when the town monastery had been destroyed. For some reason, he had been singled out for a special punishment used to break monks and build a new breed for Tibet. A female Chinese soldier had been ordered to become pregnant by him. Jomo had never known his mother, only that she had been one of the Chinese invaders and had forced Gyalo to surrender his robe by giving him a son.
“Why did you go in there?” Shan asked as Jomo coaxed the aged truck to life.
“He left me a note this morning. He said he urgently needed to know everything about those murders.”
The cleaning crew assigned to the constable’s office performed its chores after the supper hour, entering in the dark through the rear door under a guard detail that Jin had decided to supervise. Shan kept his head low, half concealed by a mop. Fighting a terrible, nearly paralyzing fear, he worked his mop toward the metal door that marked the corridor of holding cells, sliding the bucket forward with his foot. The heavy door was locked when he reached it. Suddenly an arm extended past his shoulder with a key. Constable Jin blocked Shan’s passage as the door swung open, gesturing forward a gray haired woman, clutching two empty plastic buckets, who advanced with a businesslike air. The constable stood guard at the door, glaring at Shan as he went through the motions of cleaning a row of benches along the adjacent wall. Moments later the woman reappeared, expressionless, her buckets now filled with stained rags, splinters of wood, and other debris from the interrogation rooms. Jin held the door for Shan, escorted him to the cell at the end of the corridor and opened it.
“If he takes one step outside this cell,” Jin hissed, “I will shoot you both.”
The cell, still reeking of blood, vomit, and ammonia, had changed little since Shan left it. The blood soaked pallet had been replaced, the stains scrubbed from the floor, replaced by new ones, the piles of rags had been tossed against the back wall. Only one of the filthy piles was Colonel Tan of the People’s Liberation Army, the dreaded tyrant of Lhadrung County.
Shan turned and confronted Jin with a silent, expectant gaze.
“Fuck your mother,” Jin spat, then spun about and retreated to the door at the far end of the corridor.
Tan, either unconscious or sleeping, was slumped against the wall, his body convulsing every few moments- the aftereffect, Shan well knew, of electroshock. Shan did his best to clean the filthy tin cup at the sink, filled it from a bucket of water and bent to Tan. When he touched the colonel’s shoulder, Tan reacted as if he had been struck, jerking away with a groan, his upper body slowly falling toward the floor, lacking the strength to right itself.
Shan cradled Tan’s head against his leg and dripped water over his split, bloodied lips. After a moment the colonel reacted with another groan. His eyelids fluttered, struggling to open, then he gave up and lost consciousness. Shan dripped water over his head. Then with a wet rag he wiped the blood from Tan’s face, tied another rag over an oozing wound on his temple, and inspected the bloody ends of his fingers. Shan thought of running to the interrogation room for a medical kit but realized the knobs would raise unwelcome questions when they discovered their prisoner in bandages. Tan’s feet were bare, badly bruised.
Beating the soles of the feet was a trademark of older interrogators, used widely by the gangs of Red Guards who had terrorized the country a generation earlier. The fingers of Tan’s left hand twitched; on his forearm Shan found the telltale marks of two electrode clamps.
He found himself murmuring the mani mantra, the prayer for the Compassionate Buddha, as the lamas in his prison had done when they first cleaned his own interrogation wounds, years earlier. Tan’s eyelids fluttered again and stayed open this time, eyes still unseeing. Shan held the cup to his lips and he drank.
After draining the cup, Tan breathed deeply, rolled his head toward Shan, and recoiled in horror, jerking himself upright, lashing out with a hand to slap Shan’s cheek with surprising force.
“You!” he snarled, and mustered enough strength to kick at Shan, flailing the air with his feet, until he collapsed against the wall again with an agonized groan. He seemed to regard Shan’s presence as a new form of torture.
“The old lamas taught me a trick,” Shan said in a low, steady voice, “for when the pain gets unbearable. Hold your breath as long as you can and count. When you breathe again, start over. Just focus on breathing and counting.”
“You have no right!” Tan spat. His voice was hoarse but its fury was unmistakable. His face narrowed in confusion. “How could you possibly know? How could you possibly be here?”
“Have you forgotten this is where the medical prison is you transferred my son? I assumed you did it to get rid of me, knowing I would follow.”
A battle raged behind Tan’s black pupils. The animal the knobs had reduced him to fought with something else, the brooding, conscious thing that had been pushed deep inside. His eyes glazed then brightened, then glazed again before a hard, familiar gleam returned to them. “I sign papers for the transfer of dozens of recalcitrant prisoners. I can’t be expected to remember every parasite who transits through my county.”
It was a lie, they both knew, for Shan and Ko had presented persistent headaches to Tan in Lhadrung. “You use the present tense. I admire your optimism.” Shan rose and filled the cup again. As he extended it Tan knocked the cup away with a violent sweep of his arm.
“If they knew who you were, Shan, you’d be in the next cell. Get out or I’ll tell them.”
Shan silently retrieved the cup, filled it again and set it on the stool just beyond Tan’s reach.
“I was there, Colonel, minutes after the murderer left. They found me soaked with one of the victims’ blood. For a few days I was their favorite solution. Then I told them how to find the gun.”
Tan’s eyes flared. For a moment it seemed he was summoning the strength to leap at Shan. He was ten years older but he was all sinew and bone.
“They have only just begun on you,” Shan explained. “You know how it works. They are rewriting the script so they will know exactly what song they need you to sing. Tomorrow or the next day you’ll start seeing new faces, new devices, probably a doctor or two from the prison clinic. It’s what we used to call a half-moon case.”
Tan spat out blood, then with a finger probed the teeth of his upper jaw. “Half moon?”
“A case of vital political implications. It is too inconvenient to have it linger. Worse, it is politically embarrassing. Beijing will insist it be closed in two weeks. And one is already gone.”
“I don’t want your damned help. Go find one of your Tibetan beggars to coddle.”
“I predict a closed trial. Then they will take you to somewhere private, maybe just the cellar of this building, though I rather expect it will be somewhere remote up in the mountains. You will face a small group of senior Party members, probably a general or two. An officer young enough to be your grandson will sneer at you a moment, then slowly draw his pistol and put a bullet between your eyes.
“By the end of the month there will be a new colonel in your office in Lhadrung. All those photos of you on maneuvers, commanding brigades of tanks and missile batteries, presiding over National Day celebrations at town hall- they will take them and burn them. I recall you kept personal journals of your illustrious career. Toilet paper is
in short supply. They will probably take your journals to the prisoners’ latrines. The last evidence of your existence on earth will be wiped on the backside of a starving Tibetan monk.”
“Get out!” Tan spat. A thin rivulet of blood spilled down his chin.
Shan looked up at the window high on the back wall, noticing for the first time the crimson splotches on the reinforced glass, then glanced at Tan’s bloody fingertips. The colonel, incredibly, had been climbing up, trying to break the window. “When they stop the torture,” Shan continued in a matter-of-fact tone, “that’s when you know it’s over. They will give you two days to heal, to be cleaned up. When the barber comes, you’re a dead man for certain. They want you to be able to stand up straight, clean and trimmed, ready for final inspection, before they eliminate you and everything you ever touched.”
The light faded from Tan’s eyes. His gaze shifted past Shan and settled on Constable Jin at the end of the corridor. “So you bribed a guard so you could gloat?” Tan muttered. “Maybe take a picture to share with your Tibetan friends in Lhadrung?”
“I came because you are innocent.”
Tan’s eyes turned back toward Shan, though his stony expression did not change. “You don’t know that.”
“Colonel, if you had murdered a minister of the State Council you wouldn’t have run, wouldn’t have tossed away your gun. You would have sat there and waited and berated the arresting officer for his dirty boots.”
With obvious effort Tan pushed himself up against the wall, high enough to grab the cup of water from the stool and gulped it down. His hand began twitching again. He seized it with his other hand, squeezing until the knuckles were white. “I’m not one of your pathetic lamas. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want the help of the likes of you.”
“When was your gun stolen? At the hotel? Have they asked you about the Western woman? Have Western investigators arrived?”
Tan pushed against the wall harder, until he could stand. He staggered a moment then straightened, the ramrod-stiff soldier again. He pulled off the rag Shan had tied around his head and threw it at Shan’s chest. He took a single step forward, raised a battered, bloody hand, and with a powerful blow hit Shan on the chest so hard he was slammed against the bars of the cell door.
“Guard!” Tan shouted toward Jin. “This lunatic has breached security! Get him out! He endangers your murderer!”
Jin led Shan out of the building with a victorious gleam in his eye, leaving him alone on a corner under one of the town’s few streetlights. Shan sat on the curb and stared at the fresh stain on his shirt. Tan’s blood.
Gradually he became aware of someone hovering near the edge of the pool of light. It was a teenage Tibetan, wearing one of the red T-shirts Tsipon gave to his porters, his features tight with fear. It seemed to take all of Shan’s strength to gesture him forward.
“It’s Tenzin!” the porter exclaimed in a terrified whisper. “Kypo said to find you. Tenzin’s ghost was seen in the village, doing the work of Yama the Lord of Death.”
Chapter Four
The arrival of one of Tsipon’s trucks in one of the high villages was usually a cause for celebration. Shan had often watched as children climbed over the visiting trucks while Kypo negotiated for porters and guides, exclaiming as candy and fruit were handed out by Tsipon or Kypo, the matrons of the village just as excited over handouts of household wares. But as Shan eased the old truck toward the edge of Tumkot village, he might as well have been Public Security. In the hills above, a flock of long-haired sheep was being hurried into the maze of rocks at the foot of the high escarpment that curled around to the south. Children were being pulled into the stone and timber houses, several women even jerked closed the shutters of their houses as if one of the violent Himalayan storms had arrived.
Tumkot was not the largest of the hill villages, nor was it the closest to Shogo town. But here the mountain tribesmen were most skilled at high altitude climbing, here the inhabitants were most traditional, here was the one village where people still openly spoke of life before the Chinese arrived. More than once Shan had found time on his village errands for Tsipon to sit in the shadows unnoticed, taking joy in watching the villagers in their simple daily routines, cheerfully hauling water from the well, singing old songs as they carded wool, hauling night soil on their backs in large dogo baskets braced with head traps.
He parked the old Jiefang in the shadow of a stable, its engine still sputtering after he switched off the ignition, then walked slowly along the highest of the streets, looking down on rooftops that were nearly covered with peas and turnips drying for winter stews. He proceeded to the far end of the village, climbed down a flight of stone stairs, cupped from centuries of use, onto the main street, then ventured into the small central square surrounding the hand pump of the village well.
A young girl struggled to fill a battered wooden bucket, the long, heavy pump handle nearly lifting her off her feet on the upward strokes. She gasped in surprise as Shan, reaching from behind her, clasped his hand around the handle and began pumping. Casting a nervous glance up the street, she offered him a shy smile then sat on the granite step beside the bucket.
“Only half,” she whispered. “It’s all I can carry. And don’t go out of the square. Mother says it is dangerous out of the square.”
Shan recognized the house the girl looked toward, not because its appearance was much different from the other squat two-story structures adjoining it, but from the colorful coils of climbing ropes arrayed on pegs in its front wall. “But you and I,” he said, filling the bucket, “are going to the same place.”
The girl placed her hand on the bucket handle as Shan carried it out of the square.
“What dangers does your mother speak of?” Shan asked as they walked past the first of the shuttered houses.
The girl looked up with wide eyes. “Gods are disappearing,” she declared in a solemn tone. “That angry ghost is vengeful. Messengers of the Lord of Death have come,” she said, and pointed to a pole with a crosspiece like a mast that held prayer flags, one of the highest points in the village. Two crows, traditional emissaries to Yama, sat on the wooden crosspiece.
As they passed the next house, a man opened a door, saw Shan and slammed it shut. Since Shan wore a broad-rimmed Tibetan hat low on his head, he and the girl might have been taken for a niece and her uncle out on an afternoon chore. But months earlier, on Shan’s first visit to the village, Tsipon had decided to share what the Tibetans would have called the essential truth about his new employee, to avoid wrong impressions, he explained. The villagers didn’t resent Shan as a Chinese, they merely feared him as a gulag prisoner without papers, an illegal. He was another of the phantoms condemned to roam the sacred mountains.
A bright-eyed handsome woman smelling of cardamom appeared inside the doorway as the girl gleefully called out, her smile fading as she saw Shan. Taking the bucket, she spoke low and fast to her daughter, who skipped out the rear door toward a white goat grazing in the rear courtyard, then turned toward the steep ladder stair that led to the second-floor living quarters. “Kypo!” the woman called in a peevish tone.
Tsipon’s manager appeared on the stair a moment later, pulling a sweater over his shoulders. He offered Shan an expectant nod, muttered something to the woman, and gestured Shan up the stair. Kypo seemed to have no time to observe the usual formality of waiting for tea to be served before taking up the subject of their meeting. “She’ll bring tea,” he started, as if to acknowledge the custom, then leaned forward as soon as Shan joined him at a red-painted table by the front window. “There’s been nothing like this since the invasion,” he said, an odd desperation in his voice. “The younger men are furious. Some got drunk last night and tried to convince people to go raid the Westerners’ base camp and destroy their equipment and supplies to end all climbing for the season. The older ones point to the crows and the empty altars and say Yama has withdrawn his protection of the village after all these centuries. S
ince before memory, Yama has been the special deity of Tumkot. People say it is why we have survived with so little interference from the government.”
“Empty altars?”
“Nearly every family in the village has always had a little statue of Uncle Shinje,” Kypo said, using another name of the Lord of Death. “They are disappearing. Since the day Tenzin died they have been disappearing. People say it is Tenzin. An old woman said she saw him floating along the street at midnight, with a star following his head.”
A shiver ran down Shan’s spine. “I don’t understand. The killings had nothing to do with the village.” While Shan knew many of the local tribesmen were increasingly frustrated with the outsiders-who paid huge sums of money to the Chinese government for the right to climb their sacred mountain-they also owed their livelihoods to the climbers.
“They say the mountain goddess has a claim on Tenzin, that she must have him back.” Kypo looked up with pleading in his eyes. “We need him back. We need him on a pyre at the burning place above town. They want to say the necessary words to him and release his ashes back to the mother mountain. We need,” Kypo added with a twist of pain in his voice, “proof that he is still dead.” He looked down, avoiding his wife’s gaze as she brought two mugs of buttered tea, then scurried away with a jingling of her silver necklaces.
Shan sipped his tea uneasily, as worried about the hint of fear in the sturdy Tibetan’s face as about his strange words. A brawny man wearing a sheepskin vest, the village smith, appeared on the stairs from below, casting a frown at Shan before slipping off his shoes and disappearing into a bedchamber. Shan had almost forgotten. Some of the mountain tribes still practiced polyandry. Kypo was married to the demure woman who had served them tea. But so was his cousin.
“I carried his body down from the heights, Kypo.”
“How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan?”
“Soon it will be seven years.”
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