Water Touching Stone is-2

by Eliot Pattison

  Shan unfolded the paper he had taken from the school and pushed it in front of her. "Are they so eager to get the children to confess religion that they must offer bribes?"

  Xu didn't touch the memo but read it where it lay. A lip curled up, and he began to realize that the sour expression was a fixture, that perhaps she had been sour so long that it was the natural position of her face when it relaxed. Shan watched her eyes drift over the names of those who had received copies of the memorandum from Ko announcing the gift of music machines. There were two names familiar to him- Bao Kangmei, Kaju Drogme- and a third unknown to him. Rongqi, Urumqi, it said.

  Xu sighed and put the paper in her canvas bag. She held it by the edges as she did so, as if it were fragile.

  "Thank you," she said. "I have you on videotape at my office. Now I have your fingerprints." A look of great satisfaction rose on her face. "Outside agitators always make good candidates."

  "Candidates?"

  "For anything. Murder. Even treason. Good for tying up loose ends in files. Maybe just breach of public security. That memo was for government workers only. You don't work for the government."

  "Not for the government," Shan said. "It was for the Brigade."

  She shrugged, as if it made no difference.

  Shan stared at her. "Fine. Arrest me. The only thing I'm really good at, Comrade Prosecutor, is surviving. I'll go to prison. I'll survive. But they would have won."

  "Who?

  "I don't know yet. Bao, maybe. Kaju. This Rongqi in Urumqi, maybe."

  Xu lit another cigarette before replying. "I don't have to implicate you in anything. You're a weed. You don't belong here. By definition, weeds are guilty. I have a weed control program. One call and you're in Glory Camp for a year."

  Shan ignored her. "Rongqi," he said again. Was she trying to avoid the name? "Did he know Lau?"

  Xu hesitated. "A general. Former general. Now one of the top leaders of the Brigade. Second in command. He met Lau with me in Urumqi."

  "She went to the capital with you?"

  "Rongqi was the one to approve the new program for assimilation. I thought she was a model of the kind of person we need. The Ministry of Justice decided to support the program, to offer up its databases. I asked her to go, at our expense, to be recognized." There was something new in Xu's voice. An uncertainty, a hesitancy.

  "But something happened."

  "I don't know. Rongqi was cordial. They were talking, then she went cold. Said she was sick and excused herself. All the way home, she was quiet."

  "This was before she was eased out of the council position?" The day before she had died, Hu had said at the school, Ko had tried to persuade her to go back to Urumqi with him.

  "Maybe two or three weeks before." Her face hardened. "There's no connection. I know your type, Shan. The higher up someone is, the more guilty they are." She twisted the butt of her cigarette into the makeshift tabletop. "I have a riddle for you. When you're made to disappear once, they call it the gulag. But when you're made to disappear twice, what do they call it?"

  Shan sighed and looked up at the sky. "I'll go to your office, in two days. Your territory. Arrest me then if you still want to."

  Xu frowned but didn't say no.

  "I don't believe Sui was with you that day just because of your missing person inquiry," Shan said. "Not if he was looking for Tibetans."

  "He was working roadblocks for me, and for a Bureau case on smugglers. Jade thieves."

  "Jade?"

  "He asked me that day if I seen any interesting jade. I knew what he was asking. This region is the source of all Chinese jade. Special licenses are given to those who extract it and process it. Special certifications are made by inspectors to assure its quality. Special fees are assessed. Sometimes people try to avoid the procedures and sell it cheap on the black market. It's one of the regular assignments for junior officers. He heard I was going to sweep roads, he thought he would take advantage to check for illegal jade. Tibetans with black market jade, apparently."

  No, Shan was about to say. He was looking for the boys. He looked toward the rear of the garage, where Lokesh had been sleeping. Sui had been looking for the Jade Basket. He had been killed. Then Ko had given Major Bao his expensive car. Not out of friendship. Because Ko was obligated to Bao somehow. Or out of mutual interest.

  Xu was watching the compound. She looked from the horse cart to the heavy truck that blocked her car. She seemed to sense something. There was a flicker of nervousness, then she swept the smoldering butt of her cigarette onto the ground and rose with a glare that caused all around her to turn away. Shan saw Fat Mao make a motion and the diesel truck began to back up, to make room for the Red Flag to move.

  "One last thing," Shan said. "Miss Loshi. Did you ask her to come?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, her boyfriend is Director Ko. Did she ask you?"

  Xu thought a moment. "My chief investigator is in the mountains. She knew that. She offered to ride with me."

  "And watch."

  "And watch," Xu agreed with a sneer, then waved toward the tea shop. Loshi emerged a moment later, the cell phone extended in front of her. Xu's protector.

  Shan nervously watched as Xu placed her canvas bag on the hood of her car. He saw a flicker of movement at the corner of his eye. Fat Mao darted into the garage. A moment later the Uighur reappeared, holding a folded piece of white paper. Suddenly someone shouted from the far end of the compound. An animal burst out from between two trucks, a large ram, bleating, running wildly, butting its head into the air every few steps as if battling some invisible rival. Several men shouted and ran toward the animal. Others ducked into the buildings.

  In the center of the road Miss Loshi stopped and made a sound, not a scream, but a high pitched yelp. She did not run from the animal charging toward her, but stood still and covered her eyes.

  The ram seemed to take the motion of her hands as a signal. It lunged straight at her, veering at the last moment so that its heavy shoulder slammed into her knees, knocking her legs out from under her. She collapsed onto the road and sat with an expression of shock on her face as several men closed around the animal. Prosecutor Xu darted around the limousine to help Loshi to her feet. In the same instant Fat Mao ran to the limousine. Shan looked back to Xu as she led Loshi to the car.

  The compound burst into activity as the Red Flag disappeared down the highway. The men at the tables stood. The driver in the heavy rig shut off his engine and climbed out. The man with the horse brought the animal back to its wagon.

  Jakli reappeared, pulling off her cowl and shaking her hair free, Lokesh following a step behind, wearing a wide grin.

  "It makes no sense," Jakli said, looking down the highway, where the car had gone. "What is she doing? She brought no one but her worthless secretary."

  "She never expected to arrest him," Fat Mao said as he sat at the table beside Shan. "She wants to use him, and take him later." The Mao studied Shan uncertainly, then extended a piece of paper toward him. The memorandum Shan had given to Xu. "I replaced it with a blank page," he said with a thin smile. "Making her mad on purpose," he added, shaking his head at Shan. "You have no idea how dangerous that is."

  Shan took the paper from him and folded it for his pocket. "The only thing I do on purpose," Shan said, "is to find the truth."

  Fat Mao stared at him, displeasure on his face. "What if finding your truth puts all of us at greater risk?"

  "The only ones at greater risk," Shan said as he looked with alarm at Lokesh, "are children and Tibetans."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fat Mao drove quickly, always south, faster than was safe on the rough roads. There had been no argument, no discussion. Shan would go no further until he saw Lokesh back to Tibet, safely away from the knobs. Fat Mao had grimaced but said nothing, just pointing to the smallest of the trucks. Lokesh had shrugged in disappointment and let Jakli help him into the vehicle.

  As they had started down the
highway Shan watched Jakli depart in the horse cart down a dirt track that led into the hills, sitting beside the driver as the man urged the horse to a fast trot. She wouldn't listen to Shan's entreaty to go back to her factory, where knobs were soon likely to notice her absence. The zheli was meeting in four days at Stone Lake. Major Bao knew it. Director Ko knew it. Prosecutor Xu knew it. It was in the Brigade computer. The whole world knew where the surviving boys could be found in four days.

  The old Tibetan leaned his head against the seat and sang in a low voice as Fat Mao drove. He seemed to be losing strength, and not just since being told he had to leave Xinjiang. Since they had found Khitai's grave there had been times when Shan would look at his friend and think that he was somehow shriveling, as if something essential was going out of him. It was like a tide that coursed through the old man, for at other times he was still vibrant and strong. Yet the weakness seemed to plague him increasingly now, so that Shan had begun to worry that old age and the stress of their search was beginning to overwhelm Lokesh. He feared greatly for his old friend, and what could happen to him if they didn't finish their search soon. Shan had not put into words his other reason for returning to Senge Drak. He wasn't going just to assure Lokesh's protection. He had to solve the secret of the Jade Basket. And the answer was not in Xinjiang.

  The sun was nearly on the western horizon when the truck approached the rough path that marked the final climb to Senge Drak. But Fat Mao could go no further, for he had urgent business below. He cautioned them against missteps in the evening light, then offered them blankets and told them where a small cave was, the safest place to go, to wait for the sun of the next day. But neither Shan nor Lokesh intended to wait. Fat Mao had no light to offer them and left with a warning.

  "We never go in the dark," the Uighur warned. "You could fall, and no one would ever know. No one would come if you were injured."

  A blustering wind blew off the changtang. The ends of the blankets, rolled and carried over their shoulders, whipped and fluttered. Shan's eyes watered sometimes, and he remembered Mao's warning. The Uighur warrior had sounded unnaturally fearful, as though Senge Drak was a phantom place that could not be found in the dark, that perhaps didn't exist in the dark. But, Shan mused as he led Lokesh around the bend of another steep switchback, Senge Drak didn't exist in the world most people inhabited. It didn't exist at all in the world of the communists and flatlands and empty people who chanted the Chairman's verses. It existed in the world of Gendun and Lokesh, whose weakness, Shan suspected, had something to do with being cut off from that world.

  He turned and watched his old friend as he pushed against the wind, a smile on his face, one of the harmless Tibetans who somehow worried Xu more than all the others. He remembered the strange way she had looked toward the Kunlun, as if remembering something or seeing something she could not understand. Oddly, one question kept echoing in Shan's mind. What had it been like when she had sprayed paint over the faces of the Tibetan deities? Had she gloated? Or had she trembled?

  But Shan was still caught between both worlds. And more than ever he knew that the reason he had been selected by the priests was because he belonged to neither. Something had shifted the delicate balance between the two, and people were dying because of it. The key to everything was understanding what there was of the priests' world that drew them to this strange, remote land. There were pieces of it, he knew, out in the desert, where pilgrims lay long dead. There were pieces in Senge Drak and in Karachuk, and with Jakli and the old waterkeeper. The Jade Basket was part of it, but still a mysterious one, for though he knew the Tibetans did not covet things, they seemed to covet the mysterious gau. The boy, Khitai, was part of it. The boy who had carefully hidden his rosary and dorje chain, and who, Shan was somehow certain, had sat in the teaching chamber with the waterkeeper.

  Shan only had pieces. Pieces of the Tibetans' mystery. And pieces of the other, the Americans' mystery. But none of the pieces would fit together. Was it because he had confused the pieces, because some of those in the Americans' mystery belonged in that of the Tibetans?

  A new light began to shine in Lokesh's eyes, a new bounce seemed to rise in his step. Their path wasn't just up the huge rock monolith that housed the dzong, it was to sanctuary. And Senge Drak was not just sanctuary, Shan knew, it was timelessness, it was mindfulness. Shan decided that perhaps as much as Lokesh he himself needed to partake of it. He walked as if in a dream, letting his feet drop as though in an act of faith, into the shadows that covered the narrow path. Timelessness. The great barriers to understanding, Gendun had once told him, were material possessions, which only built hunger for more, and time, which pushed so many to rush through life, fearful they would miss something if they slowed, as though, if they were quick enough, they could change their destiny. Time seemed so unimportant when sitting in a meditation cell or watching the night sky. Shan too could drift if he let himself, so that the thousand-year-old mummy, and Lokesh, and Buddha's deer on the wall painting, and the tiny autumn flowers that bloomed for a few days before dropping were all mingled in the same serene place that, for lack of a better word, was his life force.

  But no, Shan thought, he could not drift. There was someone out there for whom time was important. Someone racing to kill young boys.

  He became aware in the distance of the large blunt cliff face with two outcroppings on top. There was a thin line of shadow on its lower slopes that was the path into the tunnels, snaking along the side of the lion. Below them the huge gully dropped hundreds of feet to a dark tumble of rocks below, splinters that had sloughed off the mountain. They stood for a moment together at the edge, in the last dim light of dusk, the wind blowing hard against their faces. A large bird flew past and Lokesh cocked his head to watch it as it moved over the lion-shaped mountain and appeared to settle on one of the outcroppings, a small shadow on one of the lion's ears.

  Without looking back at Shan the old man started walking toward the bird.

  As they moved along the slope Lokesh led at an increasingly brisk pace, until Shan almost had to trot to keep up. It was indeed as though time had become something different for Lokesh, as though there was an old, weak Lokesh time and a stronger, younger Lokesh time and the two didn't proceed in any particular sequence or with any predictability. No, maybe it was predictable, Shan thought, remembering how energized Lokesh had been in the old dzong. Lokesh the younger was moving toward Gendun Rinpoche and Senge Drak. Shan had to find a way to keep him there, deep in the dzong or hidden elsewhere in Tibet, for that was the land of Lokesh the strong. If he went back to Xinjiang where the frail, weak Lokesh seemed to reside, the old man might not survive.

  The dzong was empty as they entered. The brazier in the large room where they had eaten was cold. There was a half-eaten plate of tsampa on the table. They stood at one of the open portals, silently looking out over the vast empty plain until Shan became aware of a presence behind him.

  It was Jowa, but not the proud purba he had known. This was a subdued, haggard Jowa, looking half-dead with fatigue.

  "You came back," Shan said. "You didn't go with the purbas." He remembered the boasting that last night they had been together, how Jowa the warrior had taunted even Gendun. And he remembered the confused Jowa on an earlier night when Gendun had first disappeared, the Jowa who had said fighting was futile if the lamas didn't survive.

  Jowa seemed not to hear him. "I've seen them like this," he said in a haunted tone. "Three days and two nights now. Someone's got to stay with them when they're like this. He could try to fly out the window. His spirit wouldn't know what his body had done until it was too late."

  Shan found a ladle of water on the table and handed it to Jowa, who seized it and swallowed the liquid in huge gulps that somehow seemed like sobs. Shan led him to a pallet in one of the cells. When the purba dropped his head to the floor he fell asleep so fast it seemed he had simply lost consciousness.

  Lokesh was not in the hall when he returned. But Shan knew
where to look. He stepped over the sleeping form of Bajys, sprawled across the threshold of the doorway to the fragrant room, and found Lokesh sitting beside a single oil lamp. With Gendun. The old lama had anchored himself with a gomthag strap, a strip of cloth used by hermits that ran around the knees and the back to prevent the body from toppling over while the spirit was elsewhere.

  For Gendun was indeed not there.

  Shan had seen deep meditation, had meditated himself for hours at a time, but never anything like this. The man's eyes were open, but he saw nothing. He seemed to have stopped breathing. Shan bent low with a lamp and watched his wrist. There was almost no pulse, only the barest of flickers every few seconds. The danger in talking to mountains, Shan thought, was that you could become one yourself.

  They waited for an hour. Lokesh lit more incense and began a mantra. "Om gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhih svaha," he chanted. Shan had been taught the ancient mantra in prison, though he had almost never heard it used. "Gone, gone completely, totally crossed over to enlightenment," Lokesh was saying. Gendun, like Shan, was seeking the truth.

  Shan brought more lamps. Still, Gendun did not stir. Three days, Jowa had said. As strong as Gendun's spirit might be, his body was not young, and Shan feared for it. He rose and brought a ladle of water from the stone cistern at the back of the corridor of cells. But Gendun's mouth was closed, his head perfectly perpendicular to the floor, so Shan could not drip water into it. He dared not push Gendun's head back, dared not to touch his body, for a body in such a state sometimes had its own kind of fear. It could react to the slightest touch with spasms or flinch so violently it could harm itself. Imagine he is a ceramic pot, a monk had once said to him of a hermit in deep meditation, and your finger the sharp point of a nail.

  Shan let the ladle drip on Gendun's hands. At first they did not react. Then slowly, like tendrils seeking a spring, his fingers unraveled and, as if with their own consciousness, searched the back of the hands for more. Shan let a few more drops fall, and the fingers found the moisture and brought it to the lips, which quivered at the sensation of the liquid. The fingers lowered and Shan repeated the process. Gendun's eyes did not move. He dripped the water a third time and finally there was a blink. He heard an audible sigh of relief from Lokesh, then raised the dipper to the lama's lips. At its touch they opened to receive the water. He offered a quarter of the ladle, then leaned back, sharing Lokesh's relief. It might still be an hour before Gendun returned but the water was bringing him back, reminding him that at least part of him was still bound to the earth.