Xu Li waited for him at the door of a meeting room, pointing to a chair at a large metal table.
He sat. She stepped to a thermos and poured two mugs of tea, placed one on the table barely within Shan's reach, then sat opposite him.
"I know what you're doing here," she said brusquely.
It was over, before it had really started. Children were still dying. Gendun was lost. The waterkeeper lama was imprisoned. And Shan would never have his chance to help them, nor his chance to leave China. He locked his hands around the steaming mug. There were tricks prisoners played, to endure. Many of them had to do with simply getting through the next moment, not thinking about the suffering to come, only dealing with the present suffering. Had his hands instinctively begun playing the old game, he wondered, fixing on the searing heat from the mug, focusing on one sense in order to evade as long as possible the flood of pain to come? The monks in his gulag barracks had taught him that such concentration was not the best answer, that he shouldn't seek concentration but mindfulness, to steer his mind to a place interrogators didn't occupy. But he had no time to prepare, and if such concentration was the only crutch he could find, he would use it. His eyes lost their focus as he stared into the mug, absently considering how it would be years before he had real tea again if he were being returned to the gulag. Sometimes, when there was hot water, he would put a weed in it and call it tea.
"My name is Xu Li," the woman announced. "From the Ministry of Justice. I am the prosecutor for this county."
Jade Bitch. Shan almost said the words out loud. There was another trick he had learned for interrogations, not from the monks but from the khampa warriors who had shared his gulag barracks. Preempt the fear. Preempt the pain. If they were going to threaten something awful, imagine something even more terrible. If they were going to hurt you, then try to inflict greater pain on yourself. He raised the mug to his mouth and swallowed half the scalding liquid, raising a long stab of pain from his tongue to his belly. He lowered the mug and stared at the prosecutor without expression.
The action seemed to unsettle the woman. She raised her own mug, then put it down quickly as the heat singed her tongue. She frowned. "I know you are from Beijing. I don't know your real name." Her voice was smooth and supremely confident, a voice long accustomed to being in complete authority. "I don't want to know your name."
It seemed impossible. How could she have known his background already? Had he been so careless? Had everything since he arrived in Xinjiang been an elaborate trap?
"Nobody asked me if I approved of what you are doing. No one is going to. It's all Beijing, I can smell Beijing all over it," she added, as if it explained much.
Shan looked around the room. There was a chalkboard on one wall, with a number scrawled near the top. Nine hundred forty-eight, no doubt the number of citizens undergoing reconditioning at Glory Camp. There was a faded poster with a collage of bright young Chinese faces, with the caption Destroy the Four Olds. It had been one of the more enduring campaigns started by the Red Guard many years earlier, part of the insanity that had swept his father away. Destroy old culture, old ideology, old customs, old habits. It had been a particularly intense spasm of pain inflicted on the Tibetans, Muslims, and other minorities. Old books, traditional clothes, and religious artifacts had been consigned to bonfires. Entire fires had consisted of nothing but braids of hair worn in the old fashion.
Fire. If he set a fire, he thought, looking at a trash basket overflowing with paper, maybe in the confusion Jakli and the Kazakhs would be permitted to evacuate without questioning.
"But," Xu Li said tersely, "I am still the prosecutor."
Shan brought his eyes back to the woman. Why was she being so indirect? "I've seen your camp," he said tentatively.
"My chop is on file here. Glory Camp is a resource utilized by many counties in Xinjiang and Tibet."
What game was she playing? Saving him for someone else? Baiting him before moving in for the kill? "I do not doubt you are a zealous guardian of the people, Comrade Prosecutor." He returned her steady gaze.
She extended her mug as though in salute to Shan, then sipped it as she contemplated him. "I have served the people of this county for many years. I am not ashamed of my service. I could have gone back to Beijing when my first tour was finished. I asked to stay. I have received many awards from the Party and the Ministry for the progress we have made here."
He raised his own mug in salute. How, exactly, do you measure progress? he wondered. In the number of citizens sent behind wire? The size of the prison cemetery?
"I believe in the order of law," Xu continued. "I know you have a job. But I must tell you, Comrade, I am not afraid to do my job. I will enforce the law against anyone who breaks it." Xu stared at him malevolently, then abruptly rose and left the room, leaving the door open.
Shan stared after her, dazed. There were spirits in the Buddhist mythology that one might meet while traveling. They would speak in strange words, and they might bare their teeth at you, but if they moved on without eating you, meeting them was considered a blessing.
The workers in the outer office did not look up as he moved through the room. No guards came. No doctors with syringes poised. He paused for a moment, still in shock, until the faces began to turn toward him, then he quickly stepped to the door.
Outside, the limousine was gone. Jakli and her cousins were still asleep. He checked the compartment under the dashboard of the truck and confirmed there was a flashlight, then climbed into the rear of the truck and settled back onto the sacks of rice, gradually falling into a slumber troubled by visions of dead children.
When he awoke it was night. Dim lightbulbs affixed below the speakers of the public address system were the only illumination in the administrative compound. Jakli and the others were squatting by a small fire made of scraps of lumber. They had impaled several small apples on screwdrivers and were roasting them over the flames. Jakli pushed one of the apples onto an oily rag and extended it to Shan.
He accepted the apple and tossed it from hand to hand to cool it. "Did they tell you why the warehouse is closed?" he asked.
"On the orders of Public Security, nothing more. Sometimes they fumigate. Poison gas, maybe."
"I think there are people locked inside."
Jakli shrugged. "This is a prison."
He nodded his head toward the smokestack. "Where did those men go? They were carrying coal." There was no sign of activity at the boilerhouse.
"Gone," Fat Mao said. "We were asleep."
"Why would they need a Public Security guard?"
Jakli's head jerked up. "Knobs? There's knobs here?" She stepped backward, so her face was in shadow. The others looked up, suddenly alert. Her actions needed no translation.
"I saw one." Shan glanced toward the shed, which appeared abandoned. "By the boiler." A wisp of smoke rose from the boiler chimney. The coals had been banked and left to burn slowly. The demand for electricity and heat would be lower at night. Jakli moved to one of the support posts and leaned against it, her eyes sweeping across the compound.
Shan stepped beside her. "And I saw the prosecutor," he added.
"She has much business here," Jakli said, not hiding her bitterness.
"I mean, she spoke to me." He explained the strange encounter with Xu.
Fat Mao pressed close and asked him to repeat Xu's words. "She thinks you're someone else," the Uighur gasped in confusion.
"More precisely," Shan said with a chill, "she thinks I am someone who would be with Kazakhs and Uighurs, a Han working with herdsmen." He looked into Fat Mao's face as he spoke. "A Han whom the prosecutor herself is wary of challenging."
"From Beijing," Jakli added in a low voice.
Fat Mao cursed. "There were six reservations made," he reminded her. "For arrests by knob headquarters. Headquarters uses spies sometimes. Undercover agents."
"What does it mean?" Jakli asked.
"I don't know," Shan said. "Except that the
clans of the borderlands are in perhaps even greater danger than we thought. The knobs wouldn't send a spy just to help with the Poverty Scheme. Where else do the clans gather? Where a stranger might find his way among them?"
Jakli thought a moment. "Karachuk. Where Lau died."
Shan nodded. Lau had gone to the desert with her secrets, and someone had infiltrated her place of trust. "Tell me how to go."
"I will take you."
"No. You must return to town. Your probation."
"I made a vow to Lau."
"It is not what Lau would want, to have you back in prison."
"Sure, I'll go make hats," Jakli said in a taut voice. "Bright red hats with beads. Purple hats with sequins. While the children die and Red Stone is ripped apart." She broke away and stepped to the back of the shed, leaning against one of the posts as she gazed into the darkness.
He realized that she was not looking at the compound but at the distant patch of shadow where the white horse was penned. In the distance he could hear its hooves as it nervously pranced about its pen. As he approached her she began a low song in the tongue of her clan. Shan recognized a word, repeated many times. Khoshakhan. The way you tell the animals you love them.
"It's for the horse, isn't it?" Shan asked when she was done.
She started, as though she had not known he was there. "Yes. It says-" She thought a moment. "It says you are made of wind running. I will tie owl feathers in your mane, and we will ride like an arrow into the mountain clouds. My great uncle taught me. He was a synshy- a knower of horses, it means. He could speak with horses."
"You said owl feathers?"
"Owl feathers bring good luck. And wisdom."
Shan realized his hand was on his gau.
"On my naming day, a beautiful black and white colt was born, and my father promised it to me. We grew up together. Zharya was his name. We won races, many races. We went to high meadows and he listened as I played my dombra." There was a whisper behind them, and Shan turned to see that the others were listening too.
"Is he in the Red Stone camp still?" Shan asked.
She made the song again, only humming this time. "No," she said in a taut voice, just when Shan had decided she had not heard. "Once, when I knew an army truck was coming, Zharya and I dragged a heavy log across the road." She took a step away, into the darkness, but spoke again after a moment. "We rode up the mountain and watched from a cliff where the soldiers could never catch us. We were laughing, Zharya and I, standing side by side as the soldiers tried to move the log. Then Zharya groaned and fell down and there was a cracking sound from below. They had shot him with a rifle." She looked back into the darkness. "It took him all afternoon to die. He just lay there with his head in my lap, looking at me like it was all a bad joke."
A gust of wind moved through the silence, a dry, cool wind, smelling of coal dust.
"But you have a new horse now," Shan offered at last.
"That one? Just from the Red Stone herd. I don't have a horse life anymore," she said with great sadness, then climbed back onto the sacks for sleep.
Shan leaned against the pole, watching for another quarter hour, then followed the others onto the sacks. But Shan did not sleep. He watched.
The compound was empty but the lights were on at the guard towers, which switched on spotlights at irregular intervals to sweep along the fence. There was no chance of sneaking through the wire to find the waterkeeper, no chance of searching for Gendun in the special detention barracks. Shan looked back at the boiler. Electricity was still being used. Someone would have to go to the boiler to stoke the coal.
He watched the moon rise and listened to the national anthem played over the public address system to signal curfew. What was the curfew discipline in a lao jiao camp, Shan wondered. Surely it could not be as severe as that at his gulag prison, where questions were never asked. Gulag prisoners caught out after curfew were shot on sight.
He must have dozed, for when he looked up he saw the smoke from the boiler was much heavier. The boiler had been replenished. There was no sign of the workers. He waited another quarter hour, then quietly climbed past his sleeping companions and retrieved the flashlight from the cab. Its batteries were nearly exhausted, its light barely reaching three feet. Perfect for his needs.
Walking slowly, heart pounding, he crossed the compound and circled the little shed by the boiler house. There was a window at the rear. Locked. He put his face to the glass but could see nothing. From the front corner he surveyed the compound. A single vehicle with brilliant headlights moved along the outer wire, a truck on patrol.
Shan waited for the truck to pass along the front of the compound and turn down the far side, then tested the front door. It was open. There were two small rooms. Inside the first was a collection of shovels and rakes and brooms, with a long bundle wrapped in burlap on the floor. Shan had seen such bundles before, in carpet markets. The looms of Xinjiang, especially of this far southwestern corner of the region, had been providing carpets to China and the rest of the world since the days of the Silk Road.
He moved into the rear chamber, which was larger than the first. In rows stacked five and six high were cardboard boxes. Most of them were glued shut, fresh from the factory, but the dim light of his hand lantern revealed their packing labels, in English and Japanese. Radios were inside, and tape recorders, and video cameras. And more than thirty small boxes containing a machine called a disc player. Two airtight metal ammunition cases held bottles of pharmaceuticals, in their original factory packages. Some he recognized as antibiotics, others bore English trade names that meant nothing to him. He pulled a small pad of paper from his pocket and listed the contents of the inventory, then quickly scrawled at the top of the pad, Glory Camp, Black Market Goods.
Preoccupied with speculation over why the knobs had been guarding the goods- were they merely protecting evidence, or were they protecting their investment? -Shan stepped back into the entry chamber and knelt at the carpet, which no doubt was part of the same hoard of goods. The flashlight fell and rolled onto the floor as he leaned over. Not bothering to pick it up, he placed his fingers inside the bundle to feel the density of the weave, for an indication of its value. He recoiled in horror.
A feeble cry escaped his lips as he threw himself backward. His chest heaving, he crawled to the doorway. Cracking open the door, he lay there, gulping in the cool night air to calm himself. It was several minutes before he had steeled himself enough to return to the bundle.
It was not a carpet. He found the flashlight, then folded back the sacking and studied his grisly discovery. A young man stared back at him, surprised and lifeless. His skin was covered with soot, his hair jet black. The body had not been lifeless long enough to be cold. He saw moisture on his own hand and leaned closer. The man's left ear had been severed. It was an old form of torture that had been popular during the Cultural Revolution. When a prisoner refused to divulge information, refused to implicate others with information he had heard, the ear was severed. If you will not share with us what you have heard, then what value are your ears, Red Guard interrogators would shout. The face wore the remains of a grin. The great sadness that had descended on Shan flashed into horror again as he brought the failing light closer to the man's open eyes. They were blue.
He rubbed a corner of the sacking on the scalp and it came away with a greasy black smudge. He smelled it. Shoe polish. He wiped more of the man's scalp, exposing hair the color of broom straw. He dragged a fingernail over the deep layer of soot that covered the man's face, leaving a white track. It was the stranger from the power plant, the American who had taunted him at the boiler.
Lowering himself into the lotus position, he extinguished the light, leaving the room lit only by the rays of the half moon that floated through the open door. It wasn't death that weighed so heavily on him, but that death was so familiar. Since he had left his former incarnation in Beijing, death had seemed to be everywhere. Perhaps it was what one of his teachers ha
d said, that death was the final measurement in the dimensions of souls. Maybe that was what unsettled him so, that death seemed to amplify how incomplete most humans were, and that the closer to death he got, the more incomplete he felt.
Shan did not know how long he sat in the moonlight with the dead man. When he surfaced to consciousness he realized he was reciting a Buddhist prayer for the passage of souls. He sighed and began to unwrap the body of the Westerner, switching on his light again. On the left hand was a line of clean white skin where a ring had been removed. The right hand still bore a ring. Shan eased it off, a simple circle of steel with a crude hatchmark design scratched in its surface, which no doubt remained only because of its negligible value. The pockets of the man's shirt were empty. He opened the shirt. A scar creased the upper right shoulder. A large oval birthmark lay above the right hip.
The man's denim pants bore an American label. Levi's. Their pockets appeared empty. His expensive American hiking boots had been removed. He pushed his fingers to the bottom of the pockets, and from the right rear pocket extracted a rolled up piece of paper pressed against the bottom, where it had been overlooked by whomever emptied the pockets. A series of abbreviations were written on it in English, arranged in five rows. FBP it said, then SBRF, SSCF, TBLF, and on the final line only C.
He knelt at the American's head and stared intensely into the man's eyes, as if he could will them to life again. He knew nothing about the man, except that he had been young, and strong, and jovial. And far from anywhere that might have been called a home.
The knobs did this. The knobs had killed an American, he realized suddenly. What was it the American had done that made him so dangerous? Even for the knobs, killing a foreigner was profoundly dangerous. And what was the American doing that was important enough to risk his life in such a faraway, forgotten place? Sometimes the boot squads brought special prisoners here from far away, Jakli had said, secret prisoners.
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