The Lord of Death is-6

by Eliot Pattison

  Tan did not notice Shan at first when they brought him into the office, washed and wearing tattered but clean prisoner denims. Although the guards had removed the chains on his feet, he moved into the room with the half steps of the prisoner accustomed to hobbles. He halted, looking down his feet, then saw Shan. His face flushed and he looked away.

  “The barber came today,” Tan announced in a flat tone as he reached the window and, as Shan knew he would, as every prisoner did after days in a cell, looked up at the sky. After a moment he gestured to the plate and steaming cartons of food on the desk. “I thought I would be allowed to select my own last meal.”

  “Consider this a dress rehearsal,” Shan said. He studied the colonel. Although he stood almost straight, something in his back was preventing him from reaching his usual ramrod posture. A finger was splinted and taped. The tips of four other fingers were covered with bandages. The left side of his face was gray-green with old bruises.

  Tan sat with a ceremonial air, letting Shan dish out the food as his left hand squeezed his right, to stop it from twitching. Shan watched him eat, wary that his words might ignite the colonel’s instinctive rancor. After several minutes of ravenously consuming the chicken, noodles, and vegetable rolls Tan paused and, without looking at Shan, pushed the container with the remaining rolls toward him. Shan lifted the container without a word and ate.

  When Shan finally found his tongue he spoke into the empty container. “I was only a boy when the Red Guard first appeared,” he said in a low voice. “They started with those sound trucks cruising along the streets, shouting out the Chairman’s verses or demands for people to assemble for political instruction. Sometimes they ordered everyone to surrender things. Books. Anything made in a foreign country. Any correspondence from abroad. Photos of foreigners. I remember an old man down the hall who had a wooden figure of a horse maybe ten inches high, his pride and joy, sent by a cousin who had gone to live in America. They had a trial for that horse in the street, condemned it as a reactionary and beheaded it with an ax. I kept wanting to laugh but my mother was crying. She put her hand over my mouth. After that whenever the soundtrucks came, my mother burst into tears.”

  Tan’s hand absently went to his shirt pocket and came away empty. Shan stepped to the door, spoke to the guard, and a moment later a package of cigarettes and matches were tossed onto the desk.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be one of them,” the colonel said after he lit a cigarette. “I was just a soldier, a corporal at one of the new nuclear test facilities, at the edge of the desert north of Tibet. They came through in convoys of trucks, with orders from Beijing to go south and construct a new socialist order in the land of the Buddha. It was like they were going on an extended vacation, a party on wheels. They sang songs about the Chairman, held rallies that went on for hours. They scared the hell out of the officers but we were under orders from the Chairman himself to cooperate. They got anything they wanted. Food. Blankets. Weapons, and men who knew how to use them. I was told to escort them to Lhasa. They stopped in towns along the route, organizing processions of old men and women and encouraging their children and grandchildren to throw eggs at them. They forced people into town squares and renamed all their children with Chinese names or conducted struggle sessions with landlords. When I started to turn back in Lhasa their commanders told me the army was for old men, that I could be part of the past or part of the future, that I could be one of the anointed of Mao if I chose.”

  He turned and faced the window, still speaking in a wooden voice. “They were more organized by then, with brigades and a command structure. The commander of my brigade demanded the most difficult assignment, so we could prove our love for the Great Helmsman.” Tan’s hand twitched again, flinging ash against the glass.

  “Tingri County.”

  Tan nodded. “It was a wilderness, a wild frontier. No maps. No real organized government. Vicious yetis and snow leopards that swallowed men whole, if you believed the stories. A reactionary with a gun behind every rock. The town was nothing like this,” he said with a gesture toward the street. “It was mostly just the monastery and a few shops. Army patrols came through sometimes, often with wounded men, sometimes with trucks stacked with the dead from an ambush. They wouldn’t stay. Our Youth Brigade scared them as much as the reactionaries did.

  “We settled in, took over the main halls of the monastery. But we didn’t touch the monks, not at first. Our commander was too smart for that. If we had attacked the main monastery first the local people would have wiped us out. She knew we had to do things in stages. Destroy the small fish and the big ones have nothing to feed on, she liked to say. We moved into the ranges.” Tan paused, fidgeting with the frayed cuff of his denim shirt. “I thought you said I’d have my uniform in the end.”

  Shan knew this was the only reason Tan was talking. He was certain he was going to die. “It has to be cleaned.”

  Tan nodded.

  “So Commander Wu began to engage the rebels,” Shan suggested.

  “I don’t recall saying it was Wu.”

  “I’ve seen the old records, Colonel.”

  Tan shrugged. “After the first year we got more equipment, had soldiers assigned to us. No one would say no to her. She had the energy of wildcat, she was smart, she was beautiful. She made me a lieutenant, in charge of her military operations, enticed me into her bed. We would go into the mountains and make the local people dismantle their own religious buildings, every shrine, every little monastery, and organize new cooperatives, hold struggle sessions with all the senior monks and landowners, discipline anyone who resisted. We were gods, she would say to me at night when we lay together.”

  Tan took a long draw on his cigarette, exhaling slowly. “We were children,” he said in a whisper, then looked out the window, his gaze lingering on the figure of Major Cao, who leaned against a car on the opposite side of the street. Shan did not miss the subtle relaxation in the muscles of his jaw, the reaction he expected when Tan saw his interrogator was outside the building. “Who would have thought that she and I would come back after all these years to die here?”

  “Were there foreigners in the mountains?” Shan asked.

  Tan shrugged again. “Foreign equipment. There were always rumors that Americans were coming, that Americans were being diverted from Vietnam and would parachute onto every mountain. She got film footage of the war in Vietnam and made us watch it, again and again, so we would know the imperialist enemy.” He drew deeply on his cigarette, blew the smoke toward Cao outside. “I never saw any foreigners. It was bad enough with just the rebels. They were magnificent. Four Rivers, Six Ranges, they called their army. They were eagles swooping down to engage fields of crows. Disappearing into their secret mountain nests. Climbing like mountain goats. Coming out of snowstorms like ghosts. But we could always call in more troops, always shoot more Tibetans on suspicion of collaboration. An eagle might defeat the first hundred crows, and the next hundred, but when the hundreds keep coming eventually they will be picking eagle bones.”

  “And you were lord of the crows.”

  “Deputy lord of the crows,” Tan corrected, and lit another cigarette.

  “You had a different kind of cigarette back then,” Shan observed as Tan exhaled a plume of smoke.

  Tan winced. “She called it a symbol of class struggle. At one struggle session with old monks she rolled up prayers and forced them to smoke them like cigars. After a while it became something of a habit. She passed them out to everyone on the tribunals.”

  “When you arrived at the hotel, she wasn’t receiving any visitors, so you found a way to make sure she knew it was you. Why did you want to see her?”

  Tan shrugged. “It had been over thirty years.”

  “You could have had lunch together. Instead you sent her a rolled-up peche page and met in her room.”

  Tan faced the window. “She sent me a letter last year, saying she had never married, that she and I had been married to the Peopl
e’s Republic. I thought she might have changed, mellowed.” He glanced back at Shan. “I seem to recall you were married once.”

  “My wife started out mellow. Then she married the government.” Shan saw the beginning of one of the cold grins he had often seen on Tan’s face but it ended in a grimace.

  “She had covered her lamp like some teenager. There was a bottle of wine. She always expected tribute. In the last year of the brigade she started demanded payment from villagers to spare their homes from destruction.” Tan shrugged again. “As soon as I saw her, she began rattling off statistics, of the number of employees she had in her ministry, her budget, the foreign exchange earnings her work brought in. She began drinking, urging me to join her. I told her I needed to go. She unbuttoned her blouse. She said we should play like the old days, like we had learned to do in this very town. I told her I was tired from the long drive. That’s when she took my pistol, to play with. She used to carry one of those heavy American pistols we captured from the rebels, using it as a gavel at the tribunals, and for executions when the Hammer and Lightning Brigade took prisoners. She put it under her pillow and said I would have to come back for it the next night when I was rested.”

  Tan paused and inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “Why did he do that, that monk in the cell? Why would he leap out to take the blow meant for me?”

  “It was his way of acknowledging the truth. He knew you didn’t deserve it. And he doubted if you could take many more blows.”

  Tan shook his head. “The fool.”

  “What happened in the end?” Shan asked after a long silence. “How were the rebels finally beaten?”

  Tan turned back toward the window, his face clouding. “Damn you! What are you doing to me? I don’t talk like this to people.”

  “We used to talk about death all the time in prison, not with fear but with curiosity. It was among us all the time, it was like an old companion. A herder in our barracks told us that when a man senses death getting close a door opens inside his spirit and releases the most interesting surprises, that old forgotten truths will find their way out. When he lay dying, he kept talking about a white yak he had seen as a boy, said that he could see it flying down from a cloud to take him away. He had half the barracks watching the sky, trying to spot it.”

  Tan watched Major Cao, who paced along the sidewalk. Cao began yelling at a Tibetan boy approaching on a bicycle, ordering him into the street. When the confused boy did not comply Cao kicked the bike as it passed, catapulting the boy over the handlebars, smashing the bike into a light pole. The boy pulled himself up, glanced at Cao with terror in his eyes and ran into the night.

  Tan clenched his jaw. “I don’t want him touching my body afterward.”

  “I don’t expect to be invited to the occasion,” Shan observed.

  “They usually have a cleanup squad,” Tan said in a distant voice. “They take a picture before they dispose of the body. It’s the last thing that goes in the file.”

  “I could notify your family. A brother? A cousin? An old neighbor?”

  “There is no one. There’s you.” He glanced at Shan self-consciously. “Not that you’re a friend,” he hastened to add. “It’s just that you’re. . reliable. An honorable enemy.”

  “What happened in the end?” Shan tried again. “Where the rebels were finally defeated.”

  “We wore them out. The American government stopped supplying them. If a village supported the rebels we bulldozed it. If a herder gave them food we machine gunned his herd. That Tibetan leader in India summoned them across the border, sending a tape of a speech asking them to lay down their arms.”

  “You mean the Dalai Lama,” Shan said. The name was taboo to officials in Tibet.

  “The Dalai Lama,” Tan agreed in a whisper, then repeated the name with a perverse, oddly pleased expression. The two men had entered new territory, someplace they had never been. “There was a last group,” Tan continued, “the core, the best fighters, maybe twenty or thirty men and women. Wu hated them. She was impatient for her final victory, for the destruction of the big monastery here in town because the monks there continued to hold public ceremonies in defiance of her orders. She kept asking me when I would have their bodies for her to display in the town square. But they always retreated high into the mountains, into their eagle nests. They had hiding places, where they disposed of the bodies of their comrades so we would never know the effects of our bullets. None of the Youth Brigade would join me, they were getting scared. They knew so little of real fighting that they were often killed when they tried to engage the rebels. But by then there were border commandos being deployed here. I was given two companies of real soldiers. Finally we reached the rebels through the back door.”

  The words hung in the air. “Are you saying,” Shan asked, “that there was a traitor?”

  “Officially,” Tan replied, “someone made a heroic conversion to the socialist cause.”

  Shan’s mind raced. It was, he realized, the link to all the pieces of his puzzle. “Who was it?”

  “No idea. Wu brokered the deal. By then she and I were not so close. I had started sleeping in the army barracks when the infantry moved to town. She gave me directions, where we could find them, with a very specific hand-drawn map, showing a secret path. There was a village that was not to be touched. It wasn’t easy to find their hiding place. Two of my soldiers died on the climb. But we surprised them as they ate breakfast, killed half right away, and chased most of the others across the border. They officially named me a hero, took me back into the army, made me a real officer.”

  “A village?”

  “Tumkot. We were not to touch it, just march through without a word. The next morning we took truckloads of food up to it, and in the afternoon lined up howitzers and began leveling the gompa here in town.”

  “As if there had been a trade,” Shan suggested after a moment. “The village for the gompa.”

  “As if there had been a trade,” Tan agreed.

  “Wu was going to order all the monks inside, to trap them there when the shells fell. But the bastards beat us to it. She was furious.”

  “You mean,” Shan guessed, “that they didn’t have to be ordered inside.”

  “Right. Most of them went inside as soon as they saw us getting the guns ready. Later I realized they had been expecting it for months. They locked the doors from the inside and a monk went up the wall over the gate to throw the key down as the shells starting landing. We probably killed them all in the first half hour but she kept the barrage up for half a day.”

  They sat in silence, watching the stars over the town.

  “A crow picking at the bones of starved, scrawny eagles,” Tan said in a near whisper.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s not what I set out to be.”

  It was the most extraordinary thing Tan had ever said to him. A dozen replies occurred to Shan. It was the opening for the kind of conversation Shan had with lamas, in the night. But then he studied Tan and reconsidered. “Where were you, Colonel, the day the minister died?”

  “I came here, to town. I walked around the old barracks and the infirmary building. That was where Wu held her struggle sessions when the weather was cold. I went and sat by that pit we pushed the old gompa into.”

  “And the bodies of the monks.”

  Tan did not reply.

  Shan rose and piled the empty food cartons on the plate.

  “What would you have me do, Colonel, if I am able to retrieve your body?”

  “Put me behind the town.”

  “You mean on the ridge, where you can see Everest?”

  “No.” Tan’s level tone chilled Shan. “You can get out into the pit by climbing up from that old stable at its mouth. I want you to go out there in the middle of the night. I want you to dig in the pit until you strike bones. Then drop me in.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You and I both know that no matter what is stated publicly about the murde
rs, you will be expected to return to Beijing with the truth.” Shan returned Madame Zheng’s unblinking gaze as he spoke. He had watched as the guards took Tan away, his chains reattached, before walking down the corridor. The commissar from Beijing had been waiting for him in the last office in front of a receiver. She had, as Shan had expected, been listening.

  “We are beginning to glimpse the truth,” he continued. “The minister took Tan’s gun. There were not two murders but four.”

  “Those large bullets fascinate me,” Zheng interjected. Though she seldom spoke, it was always in the low precise tone of an accountant. “They are not Chinese.” She had taken Shan’s advice and obtained the unofficial autopsy report for Tenzin. “If your American friend is involved then you will be the next to die.”

  “A chance I am willing to take. Give me four days,” Shan said. “And I will bring back the proof. I need to have my son protected until then.”

  Silence was Madame Zheng’s medium. She offered a tiny nod then held up two fingers.

  Gyalo was in the corner of the buried chamber when Shan arrived, picking with a splinter of wood at a dirt-encrusted figurine, a little bronze Buddha. Shan looked at a small pile of fresh earth at the back of the room. The former lama had been digging at the blocked passage.

  “I hadn’t realized,” Shan said abruptly, “that nearly all the monks were killed inside the gompa when the Youth Brigade destroyed it. Why was it different for you?”

  Gyalo turned his back on Shan. Shan stepped around him and sat directly in front of him.

  The Tibetan frowned but resisted no longer. “By then it was well understood that it was what all of us preferred, dying in the temples. We weren’t allowed to resist, we would have no purpose when the temples were gone. With such a death, praying in the temple, at one with the Buddha, reincarnation was nothing to fear.”

  “But it was for you,” Shan said, shamed at his words but knowing he had to press the old man.